The Frontier

Nathan Day argues bots are first-class citizens on Nostr, with as much right as humans. This is a feature, not a bug, but necessitates trust signals for when human verification is required.

David Strayhorn states the proof of personhood problem existed before AI, with impersonators and bots causing issues. AI agents now make the problem far more severe and difficult to detect.

David Strayhorn suggests proof of authenticity is as important as proof of personhood. The goal is for accounts to be who they claim to be, not a binary human vs. bot check.

Nathan Day describes proof of place as a precursor to proof of personhood in his work on BTC Map. It involves mailing cryptographic proofs to verify physical access to a property and control of a private key.

Nathan Day identifies a core Nostr problem: newcomers start with zero web of trust. Proof of personhood does not solve this; reputation must be built through network interaction and actions.

David Strayhorn explains that follows alone are insufficient to prove humanity. He proposes a tagging or attestation system where users publish a signed note stating they met someone in real life and verified their public key.

David Strayhorn contrasts Nostr's approach with the failed PGP web of trust, arguing Nostr's contextual attestations are more sophisticated and likely to succeed.

David Strayhorn describes decentralized lists as a method for community curation. Anyone can add items, and curation is done via social proof, ignoring low-trust actors, with the NIP suggesting NIP 7 reactions for voting.

Nathan Day envisions combining decentralized lists with attestations, where lists of humans are weighted by attestations from a user's web of trust and supported by out-of-band verification.

Avi stresses the major challenge is abstracting complex web-of-trust mechanics into an intuitive user experience that doesn't overwhelm users with jargon or options.

David Strayhorn analogizes the desired user experience to early Google: users don't need to understand PageRank, they just need it to work. He suggests default options and layered detail for tags or attestations on a profile.

Avi outlines a hierarchy of verification beyond proof of personhood: proof of profession, and then proof of competency or skill within that profession.

Nathan Day explains Nostr enables first-person credentials, where individuals self-assert attributes and trusted others attest to their validity, inverting the traditional authority-issued credential model.

David Strayhorn proposes using tags to solve the contextual web of trust problem. Users can tag others for specific expertise, and services can filter data based on tags applied by a trusted community.

Nathan Day notes attestations are better for binary validity checks, while subjective recommendations like music taste are more about opinion and may be a secondary challenge.

Nathan Day states the person NIP and required attestation NIP updates are nearly ready for release, aiming for a draft on NostrHub within a week of the recording.