My primary motivation for these posts is to help clarify in my own mind what the killer use case or the killer capability that #nostr brings to the table.

The social media use case we are all experiencing today, is ok - it is a great alternative to the other platforms, but I feel there is something bigger, though I haven’t yet put my finger on it.

There is a big push on ‘trusted data’ but I think it is more elemental than that. I think it is about ‘trusted events’ - that something actually happened. That’s the core genius of the #nostr protocol - you sign and publish an event and it can be found on relays, validated and since signed by your npub, it can be trusted.

As for ‘truth’, I think #nostr solves the problem quite pragmatically - if two parties can acknowledge that an event was signed and published, that they trust each others’ npub, that’s all the ‘truth’ they need to conduct their affairs.

So that’s my thinking. I need to give credit to the German philosopher Niklas Luhmann whose work from the late 60s and early 70s, only published in English in 2017 has informed my thinking. His book of Trust and Power is as profound as McLuhan’s works on media and communication. With #nostr the every published event…