🤯 Jack funds the Nostr community with 14BTC!

How would you spend Bitcoin in a way that is the best possible for the future development of Nostr? The censorship-resistant global "social" open network known as Nostr just got funded by Jack, and a plan to disburse the bitcoin has just launched.

That's right, nostrians Jack Dorsey just donated 1,417,171,699 sats, and fiatjaf created a deployment plan for the funds.

What is Nostr? Nostr is the most straightforward open protocol that can create a censorship-resistant global "social" network once and for all.

It doesn't rely on any trusted central server. Hence it is resilient and based on cryptographic keys and signatures, so it is tamperproof; it does not rely on P2P techniques and therefore works. Everybody runs a client, and it can be a native client, a web client, etc. To publish something, you write a post, sign it with your key and send it to multiple relays (servers hosted by someone else or yourself).

~let us begin~

40 bounties of 5,000,000 satoshis each to projects or pull requests to existing projects that show up in the following areas:

1. Microapps (Nostr apps that do only one thing and do it well)

• An app for just publishing things and reading replies
• An app for just managing your contacts
• An app for just reading threads

2. Mobile apps are very much needed
3. New use cases besides “social” but that still deliver interoperability and standardized behavior between clients

• Bonus points if these new use cases can be interacted with with
  from the “social” clients in some way, e.g.
• if you do webpage comments on Nostr you can see and interact with these from social clients as normal posts
• if you do wikipedia on Nostr you can comment on these
  articles from social clients

4. Key management, remote signing, delegation
5. Relay discovery

• Because we should not assume everybody will always be in all
  relays or that clients will talk to all relays all the time forever

6. Making existing things prettier and better
7. Non-public relays use cases
8. Anti-spam techniques

The same person can win multiple of these, or their size can be increased or
reduced according to the size or impact of the work. The idea here is not that everybody will try to please the grant distributors by working on things they don’t want while expecting some payment. The idea is that people will work for free regardless, so they better do something that they wanted to do anyway. The list of things above serves as a nudge just in case they’re unsure on what to work on.

8 bounties of 50,000,000 satoshis each to projects that have won some of the
grants above such that they keep working on their projects and making them
better, with or without some specified conditions.

For 6 times probably every two months the community will vote on the coolest
projects to win a prize of 16,666,666 satoshis.

Specific tasks

These are things we want to see done and that may have some specific
requirements, kinda like a job. More may be added from community input. If
someone wants to execute these tasks they must put up a proposal first (just
saying “I can do this” basically) and once they are chosen they can start with the guarantee that they will get the money if they deliver the task, not having to compete with others.

1. A nice website with good documentation: 10,000,000 satoshis
2. More to be added from community suggestions

2,000,000 satoshis as small tokens of gratitude to people who have contributed to the bootstrapping of the Nostr ecosystem:

• Richard Bondi (early Nostr tooling)
• Ben Arc (Nostrtwitter)
• scsibug (nostr-rs-relay)
• Jb55 (Damus)
• Supertestnet (Anigma)
• Cameri (nostr-ts-relay)
• eskema (alphaama)
• floppy disk guy (joinstr)
• Leo Wandersleb (nostroid)
• Uncle Bob Martin (more-speech)

This is not a payment for your work of love, because that is priceless, it is just so your efforts don’t go without mention. It is also terrible because there were many other valuable contributions that are not mentioned here and life is sad.

~fin~

"The above proposal was created by fiatjaf"

A list of nostr tools to get started:

• nostr-fzf - Nostr Directory; a tool for searching usernames and channels
• nostr registry - a database of known relays with their uptime and NIP support tables
• nostr-launch - a tool for launching a bunch of relays and clients locally for development and testing
• nos2x - nostr signer extension - a browser extension for signing events on 3rd party site without sharing your private keys with them
• nostr GitHub Action - send events from GitHub Actions
• wen - browser extension for website enhancer with nostr
• nostrefresh - simple refresh function for nostr web pages
• nashboard - nostr network statistic
• anonroom - anonymous chat room inside nostr
• nostril - C cli tool for creating nostr events
• nostr-rs-relay-compose - a Docker compose deployment for nostr-rs-relay with SSL support based on Traefik
• tostr - a twitter to nostr bot
• nostr.com - a nostr web gateway for viewing events by their ID
• nostrandom.netlify.app - generate publish-able Nostr event with random keys
• nashboard - a Nostr network dashboard with network statistics
• nostr army knife - nostr army knife by fiatjaf
• joinstr - coinjoin implementation using nostr
• smtp nostr gateway - a bridge that forwards emails to pubkeys as encrypted direct messages
• ndxstr - nostr's layer 2 indexing nodes, with more advanced querying capability than currently supported by relays
• nostrillery - a tool for running performance tests against Nostr relays
• nostr-terminal - SSH-like access to your machine via web terminal, powered by Nostr.

If you are interested in building on Nostr, here is a great starting point.

👋 see yall on Nostr!