Communication is the backbone of society. Human beings are social creatures. It is possible to survive alone, but not to enjoy the fullness of life.
How do we communicate? With language, facial expressions and physical touch. And, increasingly over the last several decades, with packets of information sent over the Internet.
These packets transmit a lot of information: letters to loved ones, business communications, digital payments, and pretty much any idea that can be exchanged between two or more parties.
The mechanisms by which those packets are sent will determine the fate of humanity.
Until now, those packets have traveled through trusted intermediaries. Payments to a friend or business go through your bank, PayPal, Venmo, or one of countless digital financial services companies. Your most intimate digital communications are handled by Apple, Google, Meta, or one of a handful of mega-tech companies.
This relatively small group of companies are the holders of our digital communications, and, by extension, our society at large.
How have they handled this responsibility? By abusing the most basic tenets of our human right to privacy. The 2013 Ed Snowden disclosures revealed that the government was working hand-in-glove with these companies to surveil us. The NSA's PRISM program gave the government direct access to the servers of Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft. Our packets were in the hands of the wrong people.
But that's the whole problem - why should anyone hold our digital communications, except you and the recipient of your message?
This is the problem that Bitcoin and Nostr solve.
Bitcoin is 'A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System' that "would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution". When you send bitcoin, your transaction is processed by a distributed network of 'miners' competing to add your transaction to the blockchain. The winner of this competition earns your transaction fee. There's no central authority managing these miners; anyone is free to compete. This is called 'proof of work' and is part of Bitcoin's 'don't trust, verify' ethos.
The upshot is that your digital Bitcoin payment never passes through an entity that can abuse your data. In fact, the miners probably don't even know who you are, or who you're sending money to. That's because Bitcoin uses cryptographic keys instead of personal information to identify entities in the network. Bitcoin never knows your email address or birthday, only the public and private key that you randomly generate (the public key is like your receiving address, the private key is like your password that allows you to send funds).
In a similar way, a protocol for decentralized digital communications called Nostr replaces our trusted data brokers (Google, Facebook, Apple) with simple servers called 'relays' that anyone can operate. And it replaces user accounts tied to your identity with public and private keys, just like bitcoin.
Nostr can handle a wide variety of communications including short notes (similar to Twitter tweets), blog posts, direct messages and group chats. The difference is that your message is 'relayed' to the recipient over one of several servers that you configure yourself. You choose who relays your message, and can change this anytime. You can even set up your own relay. Again, the relays know nothing about you, they only pass your cryptographically signed message to its recipient.
For the first time in my lifetime, technologies are empowering regular people instead of large institutions. The cryptography that Bitcoin and Nostr depends on is impossible to break - even if the NSA teamed up with Google and every other tech company on the planet.
That's a lot of power for individual people to hold. Now it's up to us to use these tools. If we choose to, we can digitally transact directly with each other, and communicate over an Internet that isn't being used to surveil and control us. We can build a society based on uninhibited and uncontrolled communication - a free society.
