Keychat is inspired by the postal system — stamps, post offices, letters.
Keychat uses Bitcoin ecash as stamps and Nostr relays as post offices.
This is really interesting because I think Grin would be excellent for this use case as stamps because it is interactive.
If the Nostr relays are online all the time anyway, you can pay for the “stamp” with Grin and it would happen super quickly via interactivity, right?
It should also be said that Grin is better for something as small as “stamps” because there’s just way more of them. When Bitcoin is $1mill, a single sat will be like $1. Who is gonna pay a dollar for a stamp?
And the cool thing is that theoretically, a bitcoiner and a grinner could talk to each other across their relays. Because you’re only paying to send “letters”, not to receive them.
Side note:
I’ve had this idea for a while that Nostr posts that are public should be free, but users should pay relays for private posts like private messages. The reason being that relays could theoretically monetize (data mine etc) public posts, so they get value from them inherently. But private posts, they don’t get value from unless the user pays for them.
I am trying to figure out how the stamps come in here. Stamps are like cash/stamps you attach to a message to pay the relay fee and the communication is just Nostr encrypted messages (NIP17). Is that correct?
Optionally could be wallets connect to a private Nostr relay via tor, in that case the relay does not know a) whats in the message and b) the IP of the receiver and sender.
If tor would have a buffer function or send email via tor, Nostr would not be even needed, but to my understanding there is no such thing.
Yes. And for group chat, they are implementing the MLS standard.
The “stamp” concept is just a micropayment like a stamp on a letter. I like it because it’s an honest and transparent business model. No need for relays to find other ways to make money.
My understanding of tor is that it’s just an optional thing you can use on top of any web activity. I don’t see it as relevant to the discussion because any user can just turn on if they want to. But maybe I’m missing something.
@ardocrat mentioned using Nostr itself as a messaging system with the new Contracts flow. It might work for DMs in a crude way. But I don’t think it could work for groups for example. And the benefit I see of using Nostr is that it isnt limited to just one currency. You could talk with anyone regardless if they use Grin or not.
