In my view, Monero is only one piece of the equation to digital freedom. You need the rest of the “encryption as identity” tech stack:
Monero is to Money, What Session is to Telegram, And Nostr is to Twitter.
Censorship on Twitter has given rise to this decentralized micro-blogging alternative that uses encryption as identity for unstoppable free speech.
I narrated this brand new animated video which goes over how Nostr works and why it matters: https://video.simplifiedprivacy.com/nostr/
Nostr is right now dominated by Bitcoin Maxis, we're organizing a Monero takeover. DM us on Nostr: npub14slk4lshtylkrqg9z0dvng09gn58h88frvnax7uga3v0h25szj4qzjt5d6
I'm sorry dude, but I have to tell you, Monero people overtaking Bitcoin people on Nostr is just not going to happen. Nostr is maintained by a bitcoin core contributor. Most clients have lightning network integrated, as does the protocol. You're just not going to try to overtake Nostr without creating a whole separate network of clients and relays and a different protocol specification to remove the LN and potentially integrate Monero.
Now, there are a lot of shortcomings in Nostr. The core protocol design is solid. But the design philosophy of "add what the community wants as needed, move fast damn the outcome" is a bad approach IMO. A well thought out set of design principles (while being use case agnostic) is what's needed IMO. If I were a part of your organizing, I'd agitate to create a different protocol spec, and I have a rough idea of how such a protocol would look. It would look a lot like Nostr, it would have encrypted messaging as a first class citizen so that even relays couldn't read your messages, and it would not have so many different message types (basically one for recipients and one for relays). All the extra stuff like verification and LN would just not be there and be left to the use case specific client design.
Hey I had a different person tell me that the lightning is not directly integrated with protocol. The lightning payments are custodial. So when I use it on a web browser, I use Flamingo for signing nostr posts, and then Alby wallet for signing bitcoin zaps. So if it can be using separate software like that, I see no reason that other cryptos can't be added on the client side.
The bigger issue is that having public Monero transactions would take away from Ring CT.
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/57.md
So, most of the NIPs are optional. Technically this is a specification for an optional part of the protocol. Because of the network architecture, basically all NIPs are implemented in clients. So in a sense the person who told you that is right.
But that's a double edged sword; because most of them are implemented in clients, building a client with different functionality means creating a different network of users. If you're using a client without zaps and someone sends you a zap you will never know, if you send someone Monero on this client and they're not using the same client they'll never know. https://github.com/jesterui/jesterui is an example of a client for playing chess over Nostr, as an example. The people using this client are not the same people talking to each other using Flamingo, and the two groups of people cannot interact without using a different client. This is just a fact of life when you have an application agnostic network. To create a monero focused client is to create a separate Monero focused network. May as well try to make a better protocol specification.
Sending Monero via Nostr (or something like it) wouldn't necessarily deanonymize transactions, if the protocol for sending them was designed properly. You can't do things like derive addresses from npubs or the nostr private key, or publish transaction key images. A client could have Monero integrated and have a watch only function that notified the recipient, but nobody else could see it. This way of doing it would not give it the hype that zaps have gotten, because zaps are public, but it would work.
To see just how convoluted the protocol is check this out https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/README.md
If you decide on the new spec route, I don't mind helping with the spec, I already have done some rough work on the idea and have a bit of an idea what a good spec would look like.
Can you expand on that? Is the idea being actively discussed/developed anywhere?
No, only in my head lol. I did some rough speccing on it when nostr was very new because I didn't like how the spec for the messages was made, it makes it impossible to encrypt without a bunch of metadata.