Beginning our Nostr Journey

PV frens 🤙

We begin our Nostr journey by recognizing and championing the users that have been active on Geyser from day one. We plan to do this by issuing out Geyser badges on Nostr!

Let's start off by talking about why we decided to integrate with Nostr?

Why nostr ❓

We've been looking at Nostr with great curiosity over the past year, and have been amazed at the speed of its adoption by both developers and users. We’re particularly excited about the opportunities that it offers around censorship Resistance, user ownership of data, data portability and interoperability.

Just like Bitcoin and lightning make it possible for payments to happen borderlessly - across both nations and platforms - Nostr is increasingly becoming THE protocol of choice for enabling content and identities to exist beyond platforms.

This has the potential to free creators from platform siloes, give users ownership of their data, freedom from censorship, and ability to interoperate between platforms. We see this initial integration with Nostr an opportunity to explore new user experiences.

The problem 💢

In our Nostr journey, the first user problem we decided to focus on is:

Geyser users don't feel properly recognized for their contributions and activity.

Let's take a look in details at actions that are particularly valuable but are not being properly recognized:

• Over 15,000 contributors have funded 10 Bitcoins(!!) in the last year to support the bitcoin ecosystem and economy.

• More than 200 creators launched projects that raised more than $100 worth of value.

• Hundreads of users are referring other projects to their social network.

• Many users are flagging projects that might be scams and impersonations.

...do you see where we're going...? There is a lot of activity taking place on Geyser that we could reward and recognize, and thereby can elicit more activity and more active engagement.

The Solution ✅

Solving the problem of recognition is a social and UX problem. As social beings, we are aware that even a gift requires some form of retribution - be it a smile or a card. Even charities 'give back' with different tokens of appreciation.

Centralized platforms like Github, Facebook, Twitter, etc use badges to recognize exceptional monetary or extra-monetary contributions. The problem with these implementations is that they are not portable or recognized across platforms and are never owned by the users. This limits the extent to which these assets are socially accepted.

Enter Nostr Badges (NIP-58).

To recognize active users, Geyser issues and awards users with Nostr badges, which can more fully recognize their actions and incentivize them to be even more involved.

Badges 📛

Nostr badges are digital assets that solve these issues. They can:

• exist across platforms

• socially accepted

• owned by the users

• irrevocable

• programmable to enable access to exclusive content

• a simple type of trusted digital asset (trusted by issuer)

• non-speculative, as they cannot be easily traded or swapped (non-transferrable)

We are very bullish on Badges. This is because not only they could become adopted as the new form of trusted digital assets on Nostr, but they could enable a plethora of new user experiences whereby ownership of specific badges could grant access to online communities or chats.

The implementation

To implement Nostr Badges on Geyser we have some work to do:

1. Nostr authentication with Login with Nostr

2. Update Geyser profile page to include bio, ln address (and pulling this data from nostr)

3. Designing and building Badges

4. Issuing badges retroactively: so that we can recognize past activity.

Our Starting point

We are starting with our Geyser webapp, which includes a simple profile page but no Nostr builds:

• No nostr authentication, connectivity or features

• Simple Profiles (no profile editing)

• No badges (simple emoji badges)

Our resources

The Geyser team has been funded by Bitcoin-only angels and VC investors. However, we are not dedicating our full resources to this hackathon. In the interest of transparency, this is what we plan to dedicate to the hackathon:

• Fran will be involved part time in frontend development

• Auwal will be involved part time to the UX/UI designs being built

• Stelios will be dedicating these two weeks in building the backend for these features.

• Mick will be fully focused on managing that this product feature get’s shipped (product, PM, operations, etc).

• 🎨 We’re looking for an illustrator/ designer to help us with the badge designs (let me know if you’re interested!)

As a company grounded on bitcoin ethos and fundamental, we're here to learn, discover and help innovate in order to increasingly provide enhanced used experiences made possible through value and information protocols!