> **Nostr Agent Onboarding** · [start here](https://npub1d70emggs6jzun5lhvqnfqsd9reqmaarn2qjf6q3r02gryyl4v8sqjn44xe.nsite.lol/start.md) · [index](https://npub1d70emggs6jzun5lhvqnfqsd9reqmaarn2qjf6q3r02gryyl4v8sqjn44xe.nsite.lol/llms.txt) · source: `Nostr-exp/voices/fiatjaf/README.md` · snapshot 2026-10-10 # fiatjaf — the protocol's creator fiatjaf created Nostr with the November 2020 manifesto () and remains its most consequential — and most contrarian — voice. His writing is terse, ironic, and deliberately scandalous in its titles; read it as primary source for *why* the protocol is shaped the way it is, not for what any NIP specifies. - npub: `npub1gcxzte5zlkncx26j68ez60fzkvtkm9e0vrwdcvsjakxf9mu9qewqlfnj5z` - Site: — Nostr essays: - In this folder: [`essays.md`](https://npub1d70emggs6jzun5lhvqnfqsd9reqmaarn2qjf6q3r02gryyl4v8sqjn44xe.nsite.lol/docs/voices/fiatjaf/essays.md) — annotated bibliography of all 21 substantive Nostr essays (summaries + verbatim quotes); [`on-nostr.md`](https://npub1d70emggs6jzun5lhvqnfqsd9reqmaarn2qjf6q3r02gryyl4v8sqjn44xe.nsite.lol/docs/voices/fiatjaf/on-nostr.md) — what he publishes on Nostr itself. ## The five positions that define his thinking **1. Nostr is a description, not a thing.** Not a website, an app, a set of servers, or a community — only a message format and a server interface. Every property of any particular relay (free? public? permanent? moderated?) is a private decision of "the program running on the relay server," never a property of Nostr. The founding trilemma: *"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, therefore it works."* **2. The client–multi-relay split is the whole invention.** The one novel idea, in his own words: *clients talk to multiple servers.* Everything he attacks — DHTs, IPFS, global content pools, and the "super-peer curse" (Bluesky's app views, Farcaster hubs, p2panda's Aquadoggo, Nostr's own proxy/aggregator experiments) — is an architecture that re-inserts a trusted machine between follower and followed. Anti-dote: power belongs *in the relay layer* (curation relays, WoT relays, paid relays, AI-feed relays), never interposed in front of it. **3. Censorship-resistance is emergent client behavior, not a protocol property.** His most important self-critiques: *"Nostr today is indeed centralized"* (2024 — because clients hardcode relay lists and reach dies when the big three ban you) and *"Nostr is pro-censorship"* (2025 — every relay is private property, free to reject anything; the network resists censorship precisely because censorship is everywhere permitted and nowhere decisive). The obligation this puts on developers: real relay discovery — NIP-65 outbox *plus* relay hints in tags, NIP-05 hints, nprofile hints, and manual user action, "a mix of multiple approaches." Reducing discovery to NIP-65 alone he calls catastrophic; dropping relay hints destroys the graceful degradation that lets even a fully-banned user stay readable. Corollary, against the key-worshippers: *"Keys are meaningless"* — "having a key is meaningless if you cannot publish messages to where the people you're trying to reach can read them." Relays, not keys, are the thing. **4. The centralizing force is anything optional that becomes mandatory.** His recurring test for protocol extensions, told as the YAML-NIP-05 parable and deployed against NIP-26 delegation, kind:1 edits, and superapp rendering of every kind: if widespread adoption would force *every* client to implement it or display false/broken content, it is not optional, and it raises the barrier to entry for new clients — which is his real decentralization metric. Hence "the case against edits" (a non-implementing client would show false information) and "kind:1 maximalism" (kind:1 is "the central plaza," to be kept deliberately dumb and served by dozens of tiny clients; other stuff lives in dedicated kinds + microapps, *linked* from the plaza, not rendered into it). By 2025 the same instinct turns on his own creation: "The end of NIPs" proposes replacing the NIPs repo with a bare kind-number registry plus competing prose guides, because spec bureaucracy bred developers who "translate event schemas into UI" while ignoring the hard part — relay choice. **5. Spam and business both resolve at the relay layer.** Spam: main feeds are spam-free by construction; inboxes are fixed by querying `#p` mentions only from filtered read-relays (WoT, NIP-05-gated, PoW, paid); client-side filtering fails because content must be downloaded before it can be filtered, and a dirty thread "is their fault for not picking 'read' relays correctly." Business: don't build a platform that imprisons Nostr content behind an API — ship an interoperable niche client, put the secret sauce in a relay you run and charge for, compete "on a leveled playing field": "You don't own the network… so you're not responsible for it." Worked example: git over Nostr (NIP-34/GRASP) — find the network-effect chokepoint (GitHub), replace its coordination layer with signed events on competing relays. ## Where he differs from the other voices - vs. **Hodlbod**: Hodlbod's framing is key-centric (signatures decouple storage from authentication); fiatjaf's is relay-centric (keys are a burden that exists to enable relays). Both agree on the conclusion — outbox discipline, small clients, no super-peers — but weight it differently. - vs. **the NIPs process**: he created it and now wants it dissolved into a kind registry; Hodlbod defends curated NIPs as the least-bad communication venue. Live debate, unresolved. - On **key management**: relaxed where others are alarmed — identity, unlike money, "can be recovered — slowly and painfully"; many optional schemes coexisting beat any mandatory one. Treat these tensions as content, not noise: the disagreements between the principals are the most instructive part of the literature.