原文标题：《Meet @Fiatjaf, The Mysterious Nostr Creator Who Has Attracted 18 Million Users And $ 5 Million From Jack Dorsey》
Original article by Michael del Castillo, Forbes
Original translation: Babywhale, Foresight News
Welsh software developer Ben Arc first met @Fiatjaf (Nostr developer) in 2019 when he hacked into a Pac-Man arcade game to make it accept Bitcoin. After running into difficulties using software designed to simplify the process, Arc sent a message to the Bitcoin developer mailing list asking for help. "The only person who wrote back to me was @Fiatjaf," Arc said, and this was the beginning of a collaboration between two people who had never met but often collaborated.
The most notable result of their collaboration is Nostr, which has garnered 18 million users and reflects a growing backlash against networks run by large companies. In his first media interview, @Fiatjaf said he was frustrated by Twitter's increasing banning of users. But he couldn't keep his followers and switch to a competitor. Inspired by Arc's ideas about creating marketplaces, he began developing a new protocol to manage identity: first for social networks, then for everything else.
Nostr’s architecture lets users take their profiles and their followers to any competitor using the same protocol, as it builds a “network of interoperable networks.” The concept has gained traction, with at least a dozen decentralized social media alternatives amassing millions of users in recent months, fueled in part by widespread dissatisfaction with Twitter’s privacy censorship and civility policies.
Nostr, short for Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays, is less an actual network than a set of instructions for connecting identities. It initially gained interest among tech-savvy developers, then, with only a few hundred thousand users, it caught the attention of Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey, who donated 14 bitcoins (worth about $200,000 at the time) to @Fiatjaf, which distributed the proceeds to Nostr’s developers.
While Dorsey was still running Twitter, he invested $13 million in a similar decentralized social media project, Bluesky, which just opened to a million users on a waiting list. This month, Dorsey donated another $5 million to Nostr, which has made the network more accessible since its early days, and has developed a secret weapon: allowing users to transfer bitcoin to each other. Already, 500,000 daily Nostr users have sent each other 792,000 tiny bitcoin transactions called zaps, worth $1.9 million, and dozens of companies are building new applications on Nostr.
“If a giant company starts working on Nostr today, they might control the protocol, which is not a good thing,” said @Fiatjaf. “The same thing would happen if the protocol was created by this big company. But after the protocol becomes big, many companies will be gathered together and make money in their own way.”
This article is based on multiple interviews with @Fiatjaf and people around the world who have joined what he considers to be a social movement. Only one person interviewed claimed to know @Fiatjaf’s real name. Some of his personal details could not be verified, but what we were able to confirm is authentic.
@Fiatjaf says he was born in 1991 in the densely populated southeastern region of Brazil. From an early age, his entrepreneurial parents warned him that taxes and regulations were hurting their company. While interning at a local Fiat car plant with his classmates, he received a hat with the company logo. Years later, when he was choosing a name in an online game, he saw the hat on the table and merged it with an old identity, JAF, to create the alias, but he refuses to reveal what JAF means.
While studying economics at a Brazilian university in the early 2010s, he became fascinated by the Austrian school of economics, which teaches that large economies are too complex to plan. In 2011, he discovered Bitcoin on a website honoring Ludwig von Mises, the founder of Austrian economics, when the cryptocurrency was worth about $15. He immediately downloaded the software and started mining. “It didn’t work very well,” he said, laughing. “I mined all night and only got 5,000 satoshis.”
After briefly exploring other cryptocurrencies, @Fiatjaf began writing software that connected Bitcoin and other decentralized technologies, and in 2018 he launched an experiment called Piln that allowed servers to charge small amounts of Bitcoin for storing files in a decentralized database. But his breakthrough didn’t come until June 2019, when software developer Arc asked for help cracking Pac-Man. Arc shared an idea called Diagon Alley — named after a marketplace in the Harry Potter stories — that would theoretically allow virtual store owners to move their storefronts from Amazon to the dark web. Seeing the potential in the idea, @Fiatjaf began working on his own version that would work for any type of identity.
“A few months later,” Arc recalled, “when I read the protocol he had developed, I said, ‘Man, this is a lot like Diagon Alley,’ and he said, ‘This was one of the influences on starting Nostr.’”
Before the year was out, @Fiatjaf’s ideas had become what he called the Nostr manifesto, describing an open, censorship-resistant global social network. The computers that send short messages to each other and make up the lowest layer of the network are called relays, while applications, like social networks or marketplaces built on top of relays, are called clients. Instead of public keys identifying tokens like Bitcoin, it defines users, and there is no underlying blockchain. Nostr is just a set of instructions on how to build interoperable applications. “A lot of the things people want to see built on Bitcoin,” Arc says, “can actually be built on Nostr.”
A month after @Fiatjaf’s declaration of independence, Dorsey, then Twitter CEO, launched Bluesky with similar goals.
By early 2020, @Fiatjaf got the attention of his current part-time company, Zebedee, a Hoboken, New Jersey-based video game startup that builds software that lets game developers offer bitcoin rewards to players. After much pleading from Zebedee co-founder Andre Neves, 31, @Fiatjaf accepted a full-time remote job to oversee an internal project called NBD.WTF, which currently encompasses five bitcoin-related projects as well as Nostr.
“He’ll spend a weekend working on some random open source project that he created out of thin air because he believed it could be valuable to other people,” Neves said. “Not because he wanted to sell it, not because he wanted to build a product, but because he wanted to create something for other people that would solve their problems and improve the world.”
A Twitter controversy accelerated Nostr’s creation. In January 2021, billionaire Jack Dorsey banned former U.S. President Donald Trump from Twitter. Then billionaire Elon Musk bought the company and quickly alienated many of its most loyal users by charging for services they consider important, like two-factor authentication. Although Nostr has been in development since 2019, he’s taking a deliberately unorthodox path. “No company,” @Fiatjaf says. “Nothing.”
Nostr doesn’t even have an intellectual property license. Instead, @Fiatjaf has chosen to make the software a public product, which could expose him and others to legal trouble if some of the code in the agreement is protected by copyright by someone else, said Thomas Stanton, a Tampa partner at Stanton Intellectual Property Law Firm in Florida. “If there is a problem, he and any user could be held liable.” But @Fiatjaf isn’t worried. “I don’t care about this kind of license,” he said. “I just want people to use it. I don’t understand this stuff and try not to understand it.”
Since anyone can build apps using the Nostr standard, it’s hard to pinpoint when the first users of apps built on Nostr appeared. But in April 2022, the number of new users went from a trickle to a downpour. William Casarin, a 34-year-old Bitcoin engineer, launched Damus on the Nostr protocol, a project that was originally designed to simplify accessing Nostr in a Twitter-like environment. He founded Damus in late 2022. Damus was available on the App Store in January. Casarin, who previously worked at Bitcoin infrastructure company Blockstream, designed a way for Nostr users to send zaps over the Lightning Network. Shortly thereafter, @Fiatjaf added Casarin’s upgrade to the Nostr protocol, allowing anyone to develop to the same specifications.
The new feature proved crucial. Until then, while many of the Nostr app’s developers were bitcoin enthusiasts, there was little to no reflection of that in the protocol. After supporting bitcoin payments, Damus grew from 10,000 users to about 160,000, and Nostr’s total number of users jumped from 10 million to 18 million. About 25,000 of Damus’ users were from mainland China before the Chinese government banned the app for allegedly supporting content deemed illegal in China. Casarin believes Damus was banned because it’s a free speech tool, calling the ban a “badge of honor.”
Not only are there now nine Nostr projects using zaps, but the ability to send Bitcoin has also been backed by Dorsey, CEO of Block. Block has become a Bitcoin investment firm, with a $220 million pile of cryptocurrency as of Dec. 31, 2022, and is moving into the emerging social commerce space at the intersection of payments and social media. Accenture estimates that the social commerce industry will be a $1.2 trillion industry by 2025.
In early 2021, Rockstar, a Serbian-born developer, brought Dorsey’s attention to Nostr. Annoyed that Bluesky CEO Jay Graber didn’t mention Nostr in his detailed analysis of the decentralized social media ecosystem, he privately messaged Dorsey on Twitter and suggested he take a closer look. To Rockstar’s surprise, a few days later @Fiatjaf received an email from Twitter corporate development strategist Arnold Jun. “I read your article on Nostr and really liked the simplicity of your approach,” Jun wrote. “Would you mind chatting with me?” @Fiatjaf was not happy.
“What you are doing is extremely dangerous,” @Fiatjaf told Rockstar in the Nostr Telegram group. “We are trying to start a grassroots movement here and you talk to JACK?”
Rockstar responded: "Life needs some excitement, be sure to talk to him, they seem to talk more than they do."
"I'll talk to the guy, but I'm skeptical," wrote @Fiatjaf.
Dorsey did not respond to a request for comment for this article, but @Fiatjaf said he sent him a private message asking how he could support the protocol after the billionaire told the world in a tweet that he was trying to “figure out” how to fund Nostr.
“I didn’t know how to respond,” @Fiatjaf said. “I suggested he could fund some developers, but then he asked if he could just give me the money and let me decide what to do with it, and gave me 14 bitcoins.” @Fiatjaf gave Casarin half. Then, in May, Dorsey donated another $5 million to a nonprofit dedicated to supporting Bitcoin work, specifically to fund Nostr development.
While Nostr is maturing, it’s important to note that Twitter and Facebook were also relatively open platforms initially, restricting access to developers only when business interests forced them to. Nostr’s business model is far from certain, and the threat of centralization is already emerging. While traditional social networks generate revenue by charging for ads to support their massive server farms, and blockchain social networks sidestep centralization by paying users in cryptocurrency, Nostr developers are looking for a different way to stay afloat.
Zebedee and Arc’s LNBits are working on a product that lets users host their own servers using bitcoin. Damus is experimenting with a tool that lets users directly support the company, bringing in $145 in revenue in its first four days. If users don’t want to pay, the Nostr app will become “charity.” “A lot of advertisers have a lot of influence on these platforms,” Casarin said. “If we can find a way to make money and be sustainable without annoying our users, that’s obviously a huge win.”
Further centralization risks come from within. Only insiders recognized by @Fiatjaf have the authority to add features to the Github codebase. An internal document shared with Forbes shows that he has authorized seven people, but few have used it.
So far, the limit on the number of people who can make changes to Nostr has not stopped developers from getting involved, with 7,500 people building 26 relays to support the network; there are also Android and iOS apps based on Nostr, including a decentralized chess game, a decentralized news site for independent journalists, and several decentralized clones of Twitter and Reddit; there is also a plan to provide "geolocation services" for taxis, similar to decentralized Uber. Arc is redeveloping Diagon Alley and renaming it NostrMarket, allowing users to transfer all their digital information. "The power is in the hands of the customer," he said, "It almost becomes a form of activism."
As for @Fiatjaf, his latest work is an app that uses the Bitcoin network to let experts place bets on future events, with the goal of providing investors with more accurate predictions. “I have a lot of projects with unlimited potential.”