Incentives are important for growth, Nostr cannot scale without it and this guy agrees

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The entire Nostr protocol depends on people somewhere running a relay server. There is no "Nostr network," there are only relays and clients that connect to relays. There need to be incentives for people to run relays, and in the long run, that is ultimately going to be a huge part of how far relays can scale. There will never be Nostr relays at the same scale as Twitter servers unless they can be operated profitably or, at the very least, bring in enough money to pay for the costs of running themselves.

Nostr is the so called Twitter killer, but history should have taught us that anything that gets hyped early on as a "killer" is most likely going to fall off. Look at Ethereum and the numerous projects that emerged as killers, how many really scaled as they proposed?

Well, a number of them believed they were able to keep costs low but forgot that they were yet to reach Ethereum's size of applications network and users, their native assets were yet to get as expensive and their network as congested. Fact it, in the face of high demand, fees will always skyrocket.

No blockchain has effectively solved the flaws of network fees because none has amassed the size of users that would offset taxing the protocol to cover costs of transactions.

The importance of incentives

The entire success story of bitcoin, although not often given the attention it deserves, has a lot to thank the incentive protocol for. If miners aren't processing transactions and ensuring the uniqueness of data on the network and earn Block rewards, the crypto asset and technology would be as good as dead, there really isn't anything as "free service" anywhere in the world, whatever is called free must have found another to exploit value or attract value that the main entry route seems to be kept totally free, but that is not always the case.

Every blockchain and crypto project needs incentives to scale, the government are incentivized to work and they are walls of exploit arms to deal with, this is why they have so much power but sometimes little brains, incentives are payments for labour and the world is literally built around "trade", one has to lose or offer something to get another.

I don't know much about Nostr but this article has great links.

The opinion blog talks about how Nostr is really just shit at the end of the day but I'm quite surprised how bitcoin magazine would agree to publish that, they must have woke up on some good side of the bed as clearly Nostr has been like bitcoiner's ecosystem to go full maximalists on themselves cause nobody really cares at the end of the day.

That said, a couple of things that were mentioned as a potential solution here was advertising, and micro payments, topics that we've covered here on Hive as a prospect for value building and growth.

Even gluing all of these together though, can these different revenue models support a Twitter-scale relay? Maybe a gig-work relay could, but wouldn't its rational move be to specialize in only those types of events? What about other use cases, like social media?

Maybe an individual relay operating at that scale for certain use cases of Nostr will just not be economically viable. The basic structure of the protocol was done in a very simple way so that it can't be easily censored or have its events contents tampered with in a non-evident way. That structure comes with overhead, though.

The writer believes that even with that, the platform might fail to scale. There's something that was mentioned in the post which in my opinion is very valuable and we should all be working to change this growing narrative in the crypto space.

"People expect everything about crypto and blockchain to be free"

This is one of the major problems of crypto, literally, almost everybody expects even the tiniest things to be free, if it ain't free, it does not feel like crypto because I don't know, crypto fell from heaven with some self regenerating gold stack?

God help us. Crypto needs more protocols to build around "give and take* models, here's where I'm beginning to believe blockchain games are on the right track after all. Not everything will lack an entry barrier, some prices has to be paid to sustain the ecosystem.

Thank you and please leave a comment, your thoughts matter to me

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