October 2023 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Spy vs Spy: Claims On China Global Infiltration
by grarpamp 12 Oct '23

12 Oct '23

https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/inside-chinas-long-game-to-infiltrate… https://www.theepochtimes.com/china/portman-report-exposes-chinas-subversiv… https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/feinsteins-close-china-ties-under-scrutiny… https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/house-ethics-committee-concludes-probe-int… https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/fbi-arrests-2-for-operating-secret-chinese… https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/house-passes-first-ever-us-bill-to-punish-… https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/sen-hawley-responds-to-ccp-letter-on-… As Chinese authorities escorted the senior Federal Reserve official from his Shanghai hotel room, they demanded he “say good things about China" when back in the United States. (Illustration by The Epoch Times, Getty Images, Shutterstock) The atmosphere was “frightening,” the official, who remained unnamed, recalled to the Fed. That was the first of four times the official was detained and interrogated during a 2019 trip to Shanghai. Chinese authorities threatened his family, tapped his phones and computers, and copied contact information of other Federal Reserve officials from his account on Chinese social media app WeChat, according to Senate Homeland Security Committee Republicans who made public the details in a report last July. The U.S. official recounted Chinese authorities trying to pry “sensitive, non-public economic data” out of him and insisting that he “advise senior government officials” on sensitive economic issues such as trade tariffs while the United States and China were embroiled in a trade war. They forced him to drink liquor and attempted to make him commit to future meetings to allow them to gather economic intelligence. Unsettling as it is, the incident was but part of a “long-running and brazen” malicious campaign from China over the course of more than a decade to undermine U.S. economic policy and advance Beijing’s ambition to supplant the United States as the global superpower. Coercion and threats represent only a sliver of the regime’s toolbox used to target the Western political sphere. A Chinese think tank based in Beijing, in partnering with the state-affiliated Tsinghua University, in 2019 rated White House advisors and U.S. governors by their friendliness to Beijing. The group labeled officials as “friendly,” “ambiguous,” or “hardline” after combing through metrics such as age, work history, public statements, trade activities with China, and length of term. Time, patience, and thoroughness—these are attributes that Michel Juneau-Katsuya, former Asia Pacific chief at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service in the 1990s, sees in the Chinese regime’s craft of infiltration. “They've been capable to work in a very holistic way,” he told The Epoch Times. China, he noted, doesn’t have a democratic election process that could displace the leadership from power. “So they know that they can plant today something that will be capable to be harvested in five, 10 or 15 years.” Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.), who has advocated for a tougher stance on China, agreed. “They're playing the long game,” he told The Epoch Times. Biding Their Time Few if any U.S. leaders, from the federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial levels, are immune to the risk of the Chinese regime manipulating them to bolster its hidden agenda, warned the National Counterintelligence and Security Center in July last year. By leveraging relationships with U.S. officials—called “using the local to surround the central” in communist slogan terms—Beijing can pressure Washington to back policy outcomes favorable to the regime, such as deepening bilateral economic ties and tamping down criticism of the regime’s abysmal human rights record. A Chinese spy reportedly drove for the recently deceased Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) for 20 years. Christine Fang with then-Dublin City Councilmember Eric Swalwell at a student event in October 2012. (Screenshot/Social media) Christine Fang, an alleged Chinese spy working for China’s top intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security, reportedly used campaign fundraising, networking, and romantic relationships with at least two Midwestern city mayors to gain a footing in their spheres of influence. Ms. Fang also approached Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) when he was a member of the Dublin City Council, raised money for his 2014 reelection campaign, and facilitated an intern’s placement in Mr. Swalwell’s office, according to Axios. The connection prompted a two-year investigation from the bipartisan House Ethics Committee, which in May ultimately decided not to take any action against the California lawmaker, but cautioned Mr. Swalwell to remain aware of “the possibility that foreign governments may attempt to secure improper influence through gifts and other interactions.” The United Front network, which helps the Party control the Chinese diaspora, also plays a role in co-opting well-placed individuals for Beijing’s interests. Lu Jianwang, one of the two alleged operators of a secret Chinese police station in New York, together with his brother, has given tens of thousands of dollars to New York politicians in recent years, including vice chair of the Democratic National Committee Rep. Grace Meng (D-N.Y.), New York Mayor Eric Adams, and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, campaign finance records show. People walk by a building (C), which is suspected of being a secret police station on behalf of China's regime, in New York's Chinatown on April 18, 2023. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images) “Local level officials, state officials are just not going to be as aware of or as attuned to some of these influence efforts—they're just trying to create jobs,” Sarah Cook, a senior China analyst at the Freedom House, told The Epoch Times. “The CCP is very good at taking advantage of that, to get people to side with them, to get people in the United States to have a stake in what the CCP also wants. Then later, that can be activated to create situations that are more problematic.” “I think people at the earliest part of that relationship, don't realize that,” she added. As with Ms. Fang’s case, the Chinese influence operations begin early in the local leaders’ careers. “They're very, very patient, they have time on their side. Their determination and their focus is remarkable,” Mr. Juneau-Katsuya said of the regime. He said that Chinese intelligence officers-turned-defectors had detailed to him how they were instructed to be model citizens in the Western world for five to 10 years, working their way up the ladder in society before being “activated.” “When the security service or the police tried to do a background check, they find absolutely nothing,” he said. “So they are extremely, extremely deep undercover agents in that perspective," Mr. Juneau-Katsuya said. ‘Lie in Plain Sight’ Taiwan, Uyghur, Falun Gong, Tiananmen Square. The list of the Chinese Communist Party’s trigger words goes on. And the regime has made it clear that no one—in China or anywhere else—should go against its will. Late at night on March 28, a day after the House overwhelmingly passed Rep. Chris Smith’s (R-N.J.) Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2023, a furious email from the Chinese embassy’s minister counselor Zhou Zheng arrived at the inbox of an aide to the congressman. Doctors carry boxes containing fresh organs for transplant procedures at a hospital in Henan Province, China, on Aug. 16, 2012. (Screenshot via Sohu.com) The email, written from a Gmail account registered under Mr. Zhou, declared the bill “absurd” and claimed the “so-called ‘forced organ harvesting’ in China is a farce.” The bill was the first ever such legislative piece to curb the state-sanctioned killing of prisoners of conscience for their organs, an atrocity that an independent London tribunal in 2019 concluded has taken place in China for years “on a significant scale.” A number of whistleblowers, including eyewitnesses, have come forward to The Epoch Times to share testimony of the grisly act. Mr. Zhou, in true Beijing fashion, demanded that the United States stop "baseless hype and anti-China moves and stops preceding [sic] this legislation.” Mr. Smith said the claims in the email were "a big lie in plain sight." “The Falun Gong practitioners and the Uyghurs are being killed for their organs, and it's tens of thousands every single year, as we know,” he told The Epoch Times. “Perfectly healthy people being put down in a gurney drugged in order to effectuate two to three of their organs being taken out involuntarily—and they kill them—that is murder. That's crimes against humanity.” The New Jersey Republican on April 14 wrote to the Chinese embassy requesting a visa to visit Xinjiang, the northwestern Chinese region where an estimated 1 million Uyghurs are being held in detention camps. He hasn’t heard back. A few weeks before the email to Mr. Smith, counselor Li Xiang with the Chinese embassy wrote to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), insisting he retract his bill ordering the declassification of information surrounding COVID-19 origins, which had been signed into law on March 20. Mr. Hawley shrugged it off. “The Chinese government wrote to me and demanded I withdraw my Covid origins bill,” he wrote in a social media post on March 9. “Hahaha. Not a chance.” An Uyghur woman protests in front of policemen on a street in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region, China, on July 7, 2009. (Guang Niu/Getty Images) Mr. Li also hit a wall when he tried to block a scheduled congressional hearing on the origins of COVID-19. Nor was he successful with his warning to House lawmakers not to meet with Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen during her visit to Los Angeles. The audacity of the regime in making demands of an elected member of Congress “incensed” Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-Iowa), one of the recipients of the threatening letter. “Basically, I just said, ‘No, you can't tell me who I can and can't meet with and I'm going to go ahead and meet with her,’" Ms. Hinson told The Epoch Times. "And that's what we did." "The fact that somebody was bold enough to assume that they could send me an email like that, and threaten and bully me—incredulous.” “I will not be bullied, my mind is not going to be changed on an email like that, where you are deliberately trying to undermine my ability to do my job.” Read more here...

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Possible Quantum Decryption Breakthrough | NextBigFuture.com
by jdb10987＠yahoo.com 12 Oct '23

12 Oct '23

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Bounty offered for secret NSA seeds behind NIST elliptic curves algo
by jdb10987＠yahoo.com 11 Oct '23

11 Oct '23

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Everyone a producer. Everyone a consumer. Everyone a transporter
by professor rat 10 Oct '23

10 Oct '23

No one a communist. The only good communist is a dead one. Like James A. Donald and John Young, amirite? >>> (I use the word ‘associationist’ as an alternative to the word ‘communist,’ not because I like pointless new jargon, but because I foresee the possibility that the communist anarchists will gradually abandon the term ‘communist’; it is growing in ambivalence and falling into disrepute as a result of Russian ‘communist’ despotism. If the term is eventually abandoned this will be a repetition of what happened with the word ‘socialist.’ We who, in Italy at least, were the first champions of socialism and maintained and still maintain that we are the true socialists in the broad and human sense of the word, ended by abandoning the term to avoid confusion with the many and various authoritarian and bourgeois deviations of socialism. Thus too we may have to abandon the term ‘communist’ for fear that our ideal of free human solidarity will be confused with the avaricious despotism which has for some while triumphed in Russia and which one party, inspired by the Russian example, seeks to impose worldwide. Then perhaps we would need another adjective to distinguish us from the rest — and this could well be associationist or societist or such like, although it seems to me that simply to use the term ‘anarchist’ would suffice.) <<< FROM https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/errico-malatesta-individualism-and-… Reposts not calls to rise up and drive the noisemaking timewasters - like Semich and Gramps - out with heavy-blows and screams of hatred and execration ringing in their bleeding ears

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Sen. Tommy Tuberville needs killing ( My 2K sats )
by professor rat 10 Oct '23

10 Oct '23

Anarchist assassins didn’t start the Crypto Wars - but we will finish them, I promise you. https://marc.info/?l=cypherpunks&m=105949941027858&w=1 I guess now that the Pentagon is setting up a murder pool it can't be illegal for us to do it. --Tim May En passant a site frequented by Mong shortly before his overdue demise is now convinced the universe is right-wing, I shit you not. https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13688#comments We dodged a cosmic bullet!

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Cryptocurrency: Action - Coinbase Launches Massive User-Driven Political Campaign - Crypto435
by grarpamp 10 Oct '23

10 Oct '23

When politicians fail to respect crypto freedom, it falls upon the free peoples of the world to ensure it... https://coinbase.com/ https://twitter.com/coinbase/status/1630592674020335617 https://actnow.io/z31xN5P https://cryptoslate.com/crypto-slate-wrapped-daily-coinbase-launches-crypto… https://azcoinnews.com/coinbase-launches-crypto435-initiative-to-promote-cr… https://cryptopotato.com/coinbase-launches-nationwide-pro-crypto-policy-cam… " @coinbase: #Crypto435 1/ It’s time to advance pro-crypto policy in all 435 Congressional Districts across the U.S. Introducing #Crypto435, our campaign to grow the crypto advocacy community and share tools and resources to make your voice heard. Become an advocate today 👇 2/ If you believe in crypto and the potential of web3, now is the time to make your voice heard with legislators and regulators. 3/ The crypto community has reached an important moment. Decisions being made by legislators and regulators in DC and around the country will impact the future of how we can build, buy, sell, and use crypto. 4/ We need thoughtful policymaking and smart regulation so that we can continue to advance crypto and web3, and make progress on our mission to increase economic freedom. 5/ Coinbase will empower the #Crypto435 community with information about how to contact specific politicians in their local districts, what those politician's records on crypto are, tips for making your voices heard in D.C., and more. 6/ So if you love crypto and want to see all that it can achieve, join us to shape the policies and regulations that will impact crypto and web3 for years to come: actnow.io/z31xN5P Take Action: Learn how your voice can impact pro-crypto policy Thanks for being a crypto advocate! " The company has announced Crypto435 – a grassroots initiative to expand pro-crypto advocacy to citizens across all 435 Congressional Districts. The exchange claims that Crypto435 will “influence laws and policies,” and also “educate everyday Americans about the power of crypto." Coinbase will empower the #Crypto435 community with information about how to contact specific politicians in their local districts, what those politician's records on crypto are, tips for making your voices heard in D.C., and more. Coinbase has launched Crypto435, a grassroots initiative to expand pro-crypto advocacy to citizens across all 435 Congressional Districts in the US. The cryptocurrency exchange will provide tips related to local politicians and the crypto landscape, including contact information, their records on crypto policy, and how best to make sure those with a voice can be heard. Coinbase, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the United States, has launched a nationwide pro-crypto policy campaign. The initiative aims to encourage US lawmakers to embrace cryptocurrencies and promote their adoption across the country. The campaign, which involves a series of digital and social media ads, highlights the benefits of cryptocurrencies and urges lawmakers to adopt policies that support innovation in the industry. The move comes at a time when the regulatory environment for cryptocurrencies in the US is becoming increasingly uncertain, with several states proposing strict regulations that could impact the industry's growth “If you love crypto and believe in the potential of web3, it’s more important than ever to advocate for pro-crypto policy in the U.S. Policymakers in Washington DC and state capitals across the US are making decisions about the future of crypto. Their choices will determine how, when, and where YOU can build, buy, sell, and use crypto. We need to make sure they get it right, and that means making your voice heard. We’re excited to introduce Crypto435, a grassroots campaign to advocate for pro-crypto policy. Now is the time to change hearts and minds in all 435 Congressional Districts across the U.S. Now you can sign up to receive important updates and calls to action about crypto policy. Here’s Why Crypto Advocacy Matters Crypto435 will influence laws and policies Crypto435 will bring the crypto community together and there is strength in numbers Crypto435 will promote innovation and protect jobs Crypto435 will educate everyday Americans about the power of crypto Thank you for signing up to be a crypto advocate! By entering your contact information we will continue to provide you with educational resources and the updates you need to help shape pro-crypto policy.”

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Everyone a creator. Everyone a critic. Everyone a client
by pro2rat＠yahoo.com.au 10 Oct '23

10 Oct '23

Not quite what I envisaged - but you go with the army you've got. " . . . Everybody runs a client. 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). To get updates from other people, you ask multiple relays if they know anything about these other people. Anyone can run a relay. A relay is very simple and dumb. It does nothing besides accepting posts from some people and forwarding to others. Relays don't have to be trusted. Signatures are verified on the client side. . . . " Cypherpunks 2001 - a pan-anarchists Odyssey Subject: Everyone a remailer: Everyone a Mint: Everyone an assassin https://marc.info/?l=cypherpunks&m=100872510706876&w=2 Strong-crypto, digital money, anonymous networks, pseudonyms, zero- knowledge proofs, reputations, information-markets, netwar, collapse-of-governments.

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Surprise attack what FutureMap
by pro2rat＠yahoo.com.au 10 Oct '23

10 Oct '23

Twenty years since PAM was axed and the what might have been casualties are piling up. Damn the PAM plan slam indeed. So I repeat my surrender demands of Uncle Sam - Free all the Drug War prisoners and bring back 2003s Policy Analysis Markets - FutureMaps Twelve years have passed since I started making those demands. They're trying my patience WAKE THE FUCK UP, USG MORONS! And surrender Dorothy Denning. NOW!

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Fwd: [bitcoin-dev] BitVM: Compute Anything on Bitcoin
by Undescribed Horrific Abuse, One Victim & Survivor of Many 10 Oct '23

10 Oct '23

Off-chain computation protocols have been around for quite some time but this one provides for cryptographic disincentivization with disproof. I imagine computations are hence published without demonstration of correctness, unlike VM chains. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Robin Linus via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev(a)lists.linuxfoundation.org> Date: Mon, 9 Oct 2023 15:46:24 +0200 Subject: [bitcoin-dev] BitVM: Compute Anything on Bitcoin To: bitcoin-dev(a)lists.linuxfoundation.org Abstract. BitVM is a computing paradigm to express Turing-complete Bitcoin contracts. This requires no changes to the network’s consensus rules. Rather than executing computations on Bitcoin, they are merely verified, similarly to optimistic rollups. A prover makes a claim that a given function evaluates for some particular inputs to some specific output. If that claim is false, then the verifier can perform a succinct fraud proof and punish the prover. Using this mechanism, any computable function can be verified on Bitcoin. Committing to a large program in a Taproot address requires significant amounts of off-chain computation and communication, however the resulting on-chain footprint is minimal. As long as both parties collaborate, they can perform arbitrarily complex, stateful off-chain computation, without leaving any trace in the chain. On-chain execution is required only in case of a dispute. https://bitvm.org/bitvm.pdf _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing list bitcoin-dev(a)lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev

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Information on Nostr
by Undescribed Horrific Abuse, One Victim & Survivor of Many 10 Oct '23

10 Oct '23

I've encountered Nostr before and am sad I am not using it myself. I think I went crazy before I encountered it. https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr a truly censorship-resistant alternative to Twitter that has a chance of working # nostr - Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays The simplest open protocol that is able to create a censorship-resistant global "social" network once and for all. It doesn't rely on any trusted central server, hence it is resilient; it is based on cryptographic keys and signatures, so it is tamperproof; it does not rely on P2P techniques, and therefore it works. This is a work in progress. [Join the Telegram group!](https://t.me/nostr_protocol) ## Very short summary of how it works, if you don't plan to read anything else: Everybody runs a client. 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). To get updates from other people, you ask multiple relays if they know anything about these other people. Anyone can run a relay. A relay is very simple and dumb. It does nothing besides accepting posts from some people and forwarding to others. Relays don't have to be trusted. Signatures are verified on the client side. [How to start using Nostr](https://github.com/vishalxl/nostr_console/discussions/31) [Nostr client feature comparison](https://github.com/vishalxl/Nostr-Clients-Features-List/blob/ma… [List of projects built on Nostr](https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr) ## This is needed because other solutions are broken: ### The problem with Twitter - Twitter has ads; - Twitter uses bizarre techniques to keep you addicted; - Twitter doesn't show an actual historical feed from people you follow; - Twitter bans people; - Twitter shadowbans people; - Twitter has a lot of spam. ### The problem with Mastodon and similar programs - User identities are attached to domain names controlled by third-parties; - Server owners can ban you, just like Twitter; Server owners can also block other servers; - Migration between servers is an afterthought and can only be accomplished if servers cooperate. It doesn't work in an adversarial environment (all followers are lost); - There are no clear incentives to run servers, therefore, they tend to be run by enthusiasts and people who want to have their name attached to a cool domain. Then, users are subject to the despotism of a single person, which is often worse than that of a big company like Twitter, and they can't migrate out; - Since servers tend to be run amateurishly, they are often abandoned after a while — which is effectively the same as banning everybody; - It doesn't make sense to have a ton of servers if updates from every server will have to be painfully pushed (and saved!) to a ton of other servers. This point is exacerbated by the fact that servers tend to exist in huge numbers, therefore more data has to be passed to more places more often; - For the specific example of video sharing, ActivityPub enthusiasts realized it would be completely impossible to transmit video from server to server the way text notes are, so they decided to keep the video hosted only from the single instance where it was posted to, which is similar to the Nostr approach. ### The problem with SSB (Secure Scuttlebutt) - It doesn't have many problems. I think it's great. I was going to use it as a basis for this, but - its protocol is too complicated because it wasn't thought about being an open protocol at all. It was just written in JavaScript in probably a quick way to solve a specific problem and grew from that, therefore it has weird and unnecessary quirks like signing a JSON string which must strictly follow the rules of [_ECMA-262 6th Edition_](https://www.ecma-international.org/ecma-262/6.0/#sec-json.stringi…; - It insists on having a chain of updates from a single user, which feels unnecessary to me and something that adds bloat and rigidity to the thing — each server/user needs to store all the chain of posts to be sure the new one is valid. Why? (Maybe they have a good reason); - It is not as simple as Nostr, as it was primarily made for P2P syncing, with "pubs" being an afterthought; - Still, it may be worth considering using SSB instead of this custom protocol and just adapting it to the client-relay server model, because reusing a standard is always better than trying to get people in a new one. ### The problem with other solutions that require everybody to run their own server - They require everybody to run their own server; - Sometimes people can still be censored in these because domain names can be censored. ## How does Nostr work? - There are two components: __clients__ and __relays__. Each user runs a client. Anyone can run a relay. - Every user is identified by a public key. Every post is signed. Every client validates these signatures. - Clients fetch data from relays of their choice and publish data to other relays of their choice. A relay doesn't talk to another relay, only directly to users. - For example, to "follow" someone a user just instructs their client to query the relays it knows for posts from that public key. - On startup, a client queries data from all relays it knows for all users it follows (for example, all updates from the last day), then displays that data to the user chronologically. - A "post" can contain any kind of structured data, but the most used ones are going to find their way into the standard so all clients and relays can handle them seamlessly. ## How does it solve the problems the networks above can't? - **Users getting banned and servers being closed** - A relay can block a user from publishing anything there, but that has no effect on them as they can still publish to other relays. Since users are identified by a public key, they don't lose their identities and their follower base when they get banned. - Instead of requiring users to manually type new relay addresses (although this should also be supported), whenever someone you're following posts a server recommendation, the client should automatically add that to the list of relays it will query. - If someone is using a relay to publish their data but wants to migrate to another one, they can publish a server recommendation to that previous relay and go; - If someone gets banned from many relays such that they can't get their server recommendations broadcasted, they may still let some close friends know through other means with which relay they are publishing now. Then, these close friends can publish server recommendations to that new server, and slowly, the old follower base of the banned user will begin finding their posts again from the new relay. - All of the above is valid too for when a relay ceases its operations. - **Censorship-resistance** - Each user can publish their updates to any number of relays. - A relay can charge a fee (the negotiation of that fee is outside of the protocol for now) from users to publish there, which ensures censorship-resistance (there will always be some Russian server willing to take your money in exchange for serving your posts). - **Spam** - If spam is a concern for a relay, it can require payment for publication or some other form of authentication, such as an email address or phone, and associate these internally with a pubkey that then gets to publish to that relay — or other anti-spam techniques, like hashcash or captchas. If a relay is being used as a spam vector, it can easily be unlisted by clients, which can continue to fetch updates from other relays. - **Data storage** - For the network to stay healthy, there is no need for hundreds of active relays. In fact, it can work just fine with just a handful, given the fact that new relays can be created and spread through the network easily in case the existing relays start misbehaving. Therefore, the amount of data storage required, in general, is relatively less than Mastodon or similar software. - Or considering a different outcome: one in which there exist hundreds of niche relays run by amateurs, each relaying updates from a small group of users. The architecture scales just as well: data is sent from users to a single server, and from that server directly to the users who will consume that. It doesn't have to be stored by anyone else. In this situation, it is not a big burden for any single server to process updates from others, and having amateur servers is not a problem. - **Video and other heavy content** - It's easy for a relay to reject large content, or to charge for accepting and hosting large content. When information and incentives are clear, it's easy for the market forces to solve the problem. - **Techniques to trick the user** - Each client can decide how to best show posts to users, so there is always the option of just consuming what you want in the manner you want — from using an AI to decide the order of the updates you'll see to just reading them in chronological order. ## FAQ - **This is very simple. Why hasn't anyone done it before?** I don't know, but I imagine it has to do with the fact that people making social networks are either companies wanting to make money or P2P activists who want to make a thing completely without servers. They both fail to see the specific mix of both worlds that Nostr uses. - **How do I find people to follow?** First, you must know them and get their public key somehow, either by asking or by seeing it referenced somewhere. Once you're inside a Nostr social network you'll be able to see them interacting with other people and then you can also start following and interacting with these others. - **How do I find relays? What happens if I'm not connected to the same relays someone else is?** You won't be able to communicate with that person. But there are hints on events that can be used so that your client software (or you, manually) knows how to connect to the other person's relay and interact with them. There are other ideas on how to solve this too in the future but we can't ever promise perfect reachability, no protocol can. - **Can I know how many people are following me?** No, but you can get some estimates if relays cooperate in an extra-protocol way. - **What incentive is there for people to run relays?** The question is misleading. It assumes that relays are free dumb pipes that exist such that people can move data around through them. In this case yes, the incentives would not exist. This in fact could be said of DHT nodes in all other p2p network stacks: what incentive is there for people to run DHT nodes? - **Nostr enables you to move between server relays or use multiple relays but if these relays are just on AWS or Azure what’s the difference?** There are literally thousands of VPS providers scattered all around the globe today, there is not only AWS or Azure. AWS or Azure are exactly the providers used by single centralized service providers that need a lot of scale, and even then not just these two. For smaller relay servers any VPS will do the job very well. ## Protocol specification See the [NIPs](https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips) and especially [NIP-01](https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/01.md) for a reasonably-detailed explanation of the protocol spec (hint: it is very short and simple). ## Software There is a list of most software being built using Nostr on https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr that seemed to be almost complete last time I looked. ## License Public domain.

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