Community funding is also a single point of failure.
Let's be honest, with the solution being that relay operators and client developers need to get paid through the market systems, the general public doesn't want to pay to post, to like, to update their profile, etc. Plus, a new user doesn't have Sats, so ya that's dead right there.
What are the options?
Subscription packages like what Damus is doing?
Putting donation buttons everywhere?
Selling merch?
Selling NIP-05 names?
Listen, those are all fine and all, but there's one annoying solution that solves a decent chunk of this problem. You know it, I know it, everybody knows it: Ads.
Ads on #nostr , properly designed and developed, would be the best digital ads system in the world for all parties involved, in comparison to current ad systems, where it can go from annoying to feeling neutral about it, and this would also onboard an incredible number of people to Bitcoin as they wouldn't have to 'pay' to get their first bitcoin, they'd just use a nostr client and at some very early point in their usage they'd suddenly have a few sats because they saw a few ads as they scrolled through their timeline.
If no one develops this by X time in the future, I'd reach into my backlog of ideas and at least design and plan this out, where if the opportunity arises it would get developed, but hopefully someone does it way sooner.
quotingWe should face the issue of Nostr's lack of positive economic incentives like Bitcoin. The more people use #Bitcoin , the more miners, infrastructure providers, mining machine manufacturers, and trading platforms can survive profitably through development. We can survive without relying on advertising, but currently, Nostr's user growth and development needs, as well as the development and maintenance of relays, servers, and clients, are consuming developers' funds and time. In the short term, it can be operated out of passion. However, providing services for free in the long term is not in line with the laws of market economy. This is why many relay operators have shut down, as they did not receive funding from opensats before. The client developers who can survive now are also relying on opensats funded by Jack. If #[0] had not had the support of #[2] before, Damus would not have been able to continue its development.
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We are very grateful for #[1] 's strong support for Nostr, but without positive economic incentives, the Nostr ecosystem will only be short-lived. Nostr's survival is extremely dependent on Jack's donations, which has become a new single point of failure for Nostr. We need to rely on Jack's early donations to find a positive incentive economic mechanism, or for each client to generate profits in the future to fund opensats. This will allow #Nostr to enter a virtuous development ecosystem.
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