Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter, offered a reward of 1.2 Bitcoin (R$140,000) in early January to anyone who created a decentralized GitHub. Without much response from the community, Dorsey raised the price to 10.5 BTC (4) early this Saturday.
This rise culminates with the launch of the decentralized social network, Bluesky, released to select users on the App Store. Therefore, this is further evidence that the founder of Twitter wants to see an internet that is increasingly decentralized and free of censorship.
As for the value of the prize, today 10.5 bitcoins equals R$1.23 million. However, Dorsey has proven to be much more generous than that. In April 2020, during the Covid-19 crisis, the businessman donated $1 billion (28% of his fortune) to fight the epidemic.
Nostr is the simplest open protocol that is able to create a censorship-resistant global “social” network once and for all. 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, and therefore it works.
Everybody runs a client. It can be a native client, a web client, etc. To publish something, you write a post, sign it with your key and send it to multiple relays (servers hosted by someone else, or yourself). To get updates from other people, you ask multiple relays if they know anything about these other people. Anyone can run a relay. A relay is very simple and dumb. It does nothing besides accepting posts from some people and forwarding to others. Relays don’t have to be trusted. Signatures are verified on the client side.
Basically, GitHub is used to store program source codes, mainly open source codes. For example, most cryptocurrencies use such a solution, including Bitcoin itself. However, Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter, seems concerned about the centralization of this service. After all, in August last year, both the Tornado Cash developer accounts and the project itself were suspended from the platform.
“My GitHub account has just been suspended. Is writing open source code illegal now?”wrote developer Roman Semenov at the time.To solve such problems, Jack Dorsey increased his own original bounty by 10 times for anyone who builds a decentralized GitHub solution. In total, the billionaire is willing to spend BRL 1.23 million in Bitcoin to support such a project.
“I still believe it is crucial to have a reliable permissionless alternative to GutHub [sic]. One that bitcoin core developers and everyone at nostr would trust”wrote Jack Dorsey on a decentralized social network. “Increasing my bounty from 120 million sats to 1 billion sats.”
Nostr is unlike any traditional social network you’re familiar with. It’s not even a social network. It’s a three-year-old decentralized protocol, like the one that powers cryptocurrencies, on top of which developers can build all sorts of apps, such as a social network. Until recently, hardly anyone knew about Nostr outside the esoteric web3 community. In fact, when I looked it up, Google asked me if I meant “nostril.” But then came Jack Dorsey’s tweet.
In December 2022, Twitter co-founder and former CEO, Dorsey tweeted that he had donated 14 bitcoins — a little over a quarter million dollars — to the anonymous founder of Nostr, who goes by the pseudonym @fiatjaf. The funding sparked a wave of new Nostr identities; only a couple of days later, Musk announced Twitter would ban people from promoting other social media accounts, including those on Nostr. (The ban was soon dropped.) Though there’s no dearth of open-source social media platforms, @fiatjaf tells me the motivation behind building one from scratch was twofold.
