Original - Odaily
Author - Azuma
On the evening of December 3, fiatjaf, the founder of the decentralized social protocol Nostr, rarely used Chinese on his personal account (he was born in Brazil) to bombard the popular Bitcoin ecosystem project Nostr Assets, accusing the latter of affiliation fraud. The NOSTR token being issued is “100% a scam.”
Nostrassets is a fully managed service under the name Nostr, which is an affinity scam.
Nostrassets has nothing to do with the Nostr protocol itself. It only borrows Nostr in naming. Community members should not deposit any sats to this platform.
The token named nostr issued on the Nostrassets platform is 100% a scam and has nothing to do with the founders and team of Nostr.
As it has previously conducted a round of airdrops (TRICK, TREAT) with a single number value of thousands of dollars, and will soon issue a new token NOSTR through the first fairmint, Nostr Assets has attracted high attention in the community in the past period of time.
However, since the entire Bitcoin ecosystem is still in its early stages, and Nostr Assets is a relatively new concept, many readers still do not know enough about the project, let alone the specific differences between the Nostr protocol and the Nostr Assets protocol. Therefore, After many people saw fiatjafs attack this time, their first reaction may be to be confused.
So,What is the difference between Nostr and Nostr Assets? fiatjaf Why was the reaction so strong? Is Nostr Assets really a “scam”?Next, we will avoid some relatively technical explanations and try to answer them in the most popular vernacular.
Nostr Nostr Assets
First of all, let’s talk about Nostr, which is positioned as a decentralized social protocol, you can compare it to the relatively familiar Lens Protocol, Farcaster, etc.
Nostr is not a blockchain project, but there are certain similarities in its architecture. Although it does not rely on blockchain technology to maintain the network or verify transactions, nor does it use a chain structure to store data, it has a similar Public key + private key combination account system.
In Nostrs account system, the public key (starting with npub1) corresponds to the account number, and the private key corresponds to the password, so we can think of it as a social network connected to each other through public keys.
The founder of Nostr is fiatjaf mentioned above. At the end of last year, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey donated approximately 14.17 BTC to it as development support.
Additional reading:Interpretation of Ten Thousand Words: What exactly is Nostr? 》；The man behind Nostr: 18 million users, $5 million in funding
As for Nostr Assets, its positioning is a financial-oriented open source protocol. The vision of the project is to introduce Bitcoin and Taproot Assets assets into the Nostr ecosystem.In addition, the project was formerly known as NostrSwap, perhaps this name will be less confusing.
There is a new concept here called Taproot Assets, which is a protocol released by the Lightning Network development team Lightning Labs. It is designed to allow users to issue other tokens on the Bitcoin network and use the Lightning Network to conduct instant, high-volume, low-fee transfers. operate.
Additional reading:One article explains the Taproot Assets protocol in detail: advancing the BTC ecosystem into the multi-asset era。
Back to the vision of Nostr Assets,It is to introduce various tokens (including Bitcoin) in the Bitcoin ecosystem into the Nostr ecosystem, and then use Nostrs account system to send, receive, and trade these tokens on the social network, thereby providing Nostr with social utility. Give more financial utility.
Under the operating mechanism of Nostr Assets, the protocol itself will not directly create or transfer any tokens, and the settlement of tokens will still rely on the Lightning Network. You can simply understand this as that Nostr Assets will play a bridge role between Bitcoin Network, Lightning Network and Nostr Social Network, and this bridge has an established set of rules to allow Nostr to utilize it. Your own account system controls the transfer of assets on the other end.
Why is fiatjaf so resistant?
It’s not hard to understand why fiatjaf’s emotions are so strong.
Judging from the experience of developing Nostr in the past few years,fiatjaf does not seem to have obvious financial expectations for the project, and Nostr itself has no plans to issue coins.
As fiatjaf wrote when he launched Nostr on November 20, 2019 - Nostr is the simplest open protocol, based on encryption keys and signatures, does not rely on any trusted central server, does not rely on P2P technology, Able to create a censorship-resistant global social network once and for all - fiatjaf has spent the past few years purely building his ideal social service.
Therefore, when Nostr Assets announced that it was about to issue NOSTR tokens, fiatjaf’s reaction was that Nostr Assets was marketing in the name of Nostr, so he issued a document to clarify the relationship. As for why the rhetoric is so fierce, and even directly refers to Nostr Assets as a fraud, it seems not surprising judging from fiatjafs past speaking habits.
In October this year, fiatjaf also angrily criticized the Lightning Network as a scam, saying that the project has been defrauding Bitcoin users of their time, energy and money over the past six years.
Considering that what Nostr Assets does is to open up the barriers between the Lightning Network and Nostr, it is not difficult to understand why fiatjaf hates Nostr Assets so much.
Is Nostr Assets really a scam?
In response to fiatjafs fraud accusations, Nostr Assets responded to the official X account today.
Nostr Assets responded,fiatjaf’s accusations are baseless, Nostr Assets’ vision is to create business use cases on the Lightning Network and Nostr, and the fully managed service should not be misunderstood as a fraud; the reason why the new token issued through fairmint was chosen to be named NOSTR is the community The choice made by voting; Nostr is a decentralized, open source and censorship-resistant relay network that anyone can build on top of; Nostr Assets is empowering the Lightning Network and Nostr by introducing financial utility, and it has been successful Attracted a large number of users.
Objectively speaking, Nostr Assets’ response is not completely unreasonable. Although the naming does have a certain degree of over-marketing, it will not be directly labeled as a “fraud”. After all, Nostr Assets has not had any such incident so far. Actual acts of evil.
In this regard, many community users also expressed their support for Nostr Assets, and even compared this matter to the previous attack on ORDI by the founder of Ordinals, jokingly calling this a sign of skyrocketing for NOSTR.
Additional reading:BTC Ecosystem - Revealing the Behind-the-Scenes Story of Ordinals Founder Asking Binance to Remove ORDI。
However, there have been some community controversies surrounding Nostr Assets in the past, which is also related to a small detail in this incident-why the Brazilian-born fiatjaf chose to vent in Chinese.
This matter was previously reported by Odaily when it first introduced Nostr Assets. For details, seeThe popular project Nostr Assets is about to Fair Mint, quick participation steps in one article。
Nostr Assets has been announced in English on social media since its launch, so it is also regarded as an overseas project by the community. However, in November, the official account of Nostr Assets responded to a tweet with a Chinese sentence The founders made a mistake. The screenshot was subsequently widely circulated in major communities, causing some users to doubt the true identity and reliability of the project party, and even joked that the project party forgot to cut the trumpet.
In response to this, Nostr Assets responded that in this day and age... there is something called Google Translate or ChatGPT, but the community did not buy it and further explored its syntax: There is something called XXX Something, this is a typical Chinese thinking statement.
Since then, some users have continued to verify the Nostr Assets code and website, further confirming its false overseas identity.
Considering that the popularity of Nostr Assets is generally concentrated in the Chinese area, it may be understandable why fiatjaf chooses to use Chinese.
Finally, I want to emphasize that this article does not involve any investment advice. Regarding the upcoming NOSTR fairmint, please remember to pay attention to the risks, DYOR.
