While many of you may have heard of bitcoin circular economies like El Salvador’s Bitcoin Beach or South Africa’s Bitcoin Ekasi but haven’t been able to go and spend your sats in such a place, please know that in just a few clicks you can join the world’s biggest bitcoin circular economy: Nostr.
Yes, I know that a virtual bitcoin circular economy is different from a physical one, and I tip my hat to all those who are working to establish such economies in the real world, but Nostr is a place where bitcoin is exchanged for value provided nonetheless.
For those new Nostr, it’s an open-source protocol on top of which different types of apps (which are technically called “clients”) can be deployed and used. When you join Nostr, which you can do through any Nostr app, you’re issued a public/private key pair (like a bitcoin wallet), the first of which helps people find you on Nostr apps and the second of which lets you log in to the apps.
Nostr currently has about 42,000 active weekly users who use apps ranging from Damus (comparable to X) to YakiHonne (comparable to Substack or Medium) to Wavlake (comparable to Spotify or Apple Music), whose mobile app is a Nostr client. What’s particularly cool about Nostr is that your followers on one Nostr app follow you across all of its apps. To better picture this, imagine having the same followers on Instagram as you do on X.
Over the course of 2024, I earned over 350,000 sats, now valued at approximately $350 U.S. dollars for posting my thoughts and sharing links to the articles I write and the music I create (Nostr is a particularly cool place for musicians to share their work) — and I had less than 1,000 followers for most of the year.
Just last night, I simply shared my thoughts about how cool Nostr is on Primal, one of my favorite Nostr apps and the one I recommend that you use to get started with Nostr, and earned 2,165 sats for it.
I’ve also zapped (Nostr slang for “sent sats to”) my fair share of creators since joining Nostr, and plan to continue showing love in the form of satoshis in 2025.
So, if you’re a proponent of bitcoin being used as a currency, and you want to start taking part in the world’s biggest bitcoin circular economy, download a Nostr app today, connect it to a Lightning wallet (mobile apps like Primal have a Lightning wallet built in) and join us in accepting and sending bitcoin in exchange for valuable content today.
This article is a Take. Opinions expressed are entirely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
