keychat on Nostr: When explaining Nostr to a friend, we start with the public key and gradually rebuild ...

When explaining Nostr to a friend, we start with the public key and gradually rebuild Nostr step-by-step.

**Public Key**

Having a public/private key pair gives you a completely controllable ID, which represents you in the online world.

If you want to publish a public note, you can use your private key to digitally sign the note, proving to readers that it was indeed written by you.

**Relays**

Next, you'll consider how to spread your public notes to others. This requires setting up relay servers, either operated by yourself or others. Then, you send your public notes to multiple relays. This is akin to having a personal website on various relays. Your readers can see your personal webpage on the relay by knowing your public key.

**Follow**

However, asking others to actively open your personal website to see notes might be too demanding. Therefore, it's essential to consider adding a follow mechanism. The client continuously queries the relay to see if any new notes have been posted by the public keys you follow. This creates a continuously updating timeline.

quoting note12fg…puh9

Keychat and Damus are both applications based on the Nostr protocol. What are the design differences between Keychat, as an application for posting private notes, and Damus, as an application for posting public notes?

In our view, the Nostr protocol has three main innovative points. First, it boldly allows users to use public keys directly as IDs. Second, it has chosen a relay model where relays do not communicate with each other. Third, it is equivalent to having built-in RSS.

For Keychat, it utilizes Nostr’s public keys as identities and the relay model but does not use the built-in RSS. Keychat’s contact list is only saved locally for better privacy.

Keychat has implemented three unique designs.

To address the issue of message encryption security, Keychat employs the Signal protocol to achieve end-to-end encryption.

To tackle metadata privacy issues, Keychat separates the sending and receiving addresses from the ID and continuously updates these addresses.

To ensure that relays can operate sustainably, Keychat uses Bitcoin ecash as postage stamp for messages.