Nostr
A decentralized social protocol that re-implemented the IETF RFC process as "Nostr Implementation Possibilities" (NIPs).
In This Conversation
Pete Kaminski referenced Nostr as a modern example of the RFC process being adapted for new projects:
Pete: "This has been done by geeks multiple times, but you take the RFC process that the Internet Engineering Task Force came to, and you re-implement it in a new thing, so this is Nostr."
Pete noted a design flaw — zero-padded numbers: "They actually made a mistake by zero padding these, because they're close to running out of numbers." He initially made the same mistake with IFP before Claude Code helped him see the issue.
Nostr also appears explicitly in Pete's story A Thousand Small Mints, where it serves as the sync substrate for a mutual credit network — "a relay layer. Messages signed, published, replicated. Not one server. A swarm." This reflects real discussions in the Classic Ripple community about using Nostr to provide a sync layer to trust-based payment protocols (see Pete's Architectural and social aspects of mutual credit networks). Pete sees Nostr not just as a standards-process model but as actual infrastructure for the kind of trust-routed, decentralized systems he's building toward with IFP.
Mentioned by: Pete Kaminski
In the Inter-Face Manifesto
The Inter-Face Manifesto confirms Nostr's influence: IFP's proposal process — Inter-Face Proposals, numbered IFP-1, IFP-2, and so on — is explicitly described as "inspired by the IETF RFC process and Nostr's NIPs." Pete also notes the zero-padding lesson from NIPs: IFP numbers have no zero-padding, "no pretense of knowing how many there will be."
Related
- Inter-Face Manifesto — confirms Nostr as a direct inspiration for IFP's proposal process
- Interface Protocol (IFP) — Pete's version of the NIP pattern
- IETF — the original model
- A Thousand Small Mints — where Nostr appears as infrastructure, not just inspiration