Dealing with a communications protocol like nostr that forces you to use public and private key pairs to manage your identity online comes with a certain level of personal responsibility. Unlike traditional social media, where you create an account with an application and service that manage it for you, here you are in control of the account and the data it creates.
While this does give you a certain level of autonomy, it does restrict you in the way you access certain features; for one, it’s not easy to hand over access to an account to another user without giving up a precious key, and on the other hand, you don’t have access to centralised APIs that can help you with features like scheduling.
But that is all set to change with the launch of delegated event signing with nostr keys. This nifty new upgrade will give your account far more flexibility and give you access to a host of features that you might have missed since moving over from traditional social media.
To get you up to speed on this latest update and what you can do with it, We’ll explore the benefits of a delegated nostr key pair, review the best practices for setting up these keys and walk you through the steps to create one for yourself. With this information in hand, you can rest easy knowing that your accounts are secure and can manage delegated tasks efficiently.
What are delegated events?
This NIP (Nostr Implementation Possibility) describes ways for events to be signed by keypairs other than those commonly used. Instead of signing to create a note as we do now with one set of private keys publishing publicly to your npub (public key) as we see today, delegated events will allow you to link to additional sets of keys with your primary private key.
This can be used to allow a user to generate new keypairs for each client they use and authorise those keypairs to generate events on behalf of their root pub key (a keypair that is stored in a secure location).
The proposal introduces a new “delegation” tag that can be included in events to indicate that a delegate keypair has signed the event on behalf of another key pair.
The proposal also describes the process for creating and using a “delegation token”, which is a signature that grants authorisation for the delegate keypair to sign events on behalf of the delegator.
Why would I need to delegate events?
A delegated nostr key pair might sound like a nice-to-have feature, and for the most part, if you don’t find the use cases applicable, you can ignore it.
But it does provide a solution for a host of different problems, like:
Parent and child accounts.
As nostr matures, there will be more websites and applications that can interact with your public key, and you might want to associate only some websites with one set of keys.
You might want to set up sub-accounts for yourself, so you have:
- A child account for social media.
- A child account for gaming.
- A child account for your NSFW content.
- A child account for your eCommerce and P2P trading.
- A child account to write love letters to the Fed on their latest FOMC meeting.
How and why you would want to set up sub-accounts under a primary key is really up to you and your preference in housekeeping your data.
Think of how many of us manage our email accounts and applications today; you might have an email account that you use to sign up to eCommerce sites and your banking apps, while you have another for things like social media and gaming. You’re using these separate email accounts to compartmentalise some of your online activities for security reasons and, in some cases, because you don’t want all your communication flooding into one box.
Many of us with different email accounts manage them from one email client interface, whether the Mail app on your phone or Outlook for your desktop.
Adding protection for your primary private key.
Suppose you’re a bit of a security freak or you want to add an extra layer of security to your nostr key management because you know you might be a bit klutz when it comes to tech. You could set up a primary key, one key to rule them all, and in it, you and put all your hopes and dreams but keep that key offline; you never use that key on your daily desktop device or smartphone.
You can then delegate from that primary key to a secondary set of keys that you use to log in to your favourite nostr app on your smartphone or desktop device, knowing you always have your fallback primary key.
Delegating authority to manage tasks and activities on your behalf is a great way to ensure that your accounts are secure and gives you an excuse to start playing around with key management tools. NIP-26 is a standard for signing events on behalf of a user.
It allows a second set of keys to create events that compatible clients will render as belonging to the delegator user. Below is an example of how you could create a key using a SeedSigner hardware wallet and then delegate that key’s rights for use on another device.
Multiple account management.
Suppose you’re a social media marketing manager working for an agency that handles different brands’ social media strategies. In contrast, the brand only uses social media to engage with customer complaints.
You will both require access to the same account but don’t wish to conflict with one another use of the specific client. The client would create a delegated key pair for the social media marketing manager or agency to access the account and handle the daily content strategy without getting in the way of their work.
In addition, social media agencies could easily manage different client accounts via this model while also keeping the client in full control over the account. Should any issues occur or the client would wish to terminate the business relationship, the client can easily revoke access to the key pair they gave to the agency or freelancer.
Scheduling tools.
If you’ve used social media for business in the past, you’ll be familiar with scheduling tools; many social media platforms now have a native toolset, but there are plenty of companies that allow you to manage multiple social media apps from one dashboard and schedule your content. Companies like Hootsuite, Postcron, Tailwind and many more continue to offer this much-needed service.
These tools are often used by brands and social media marketing firms to prepare content strategies. Schedulers save time on crafting posts to keep their audiences regularly engaged while also hitting the timing sweet spots when their audience is most active.
By having delegated events, you could sign temporary rights over to a scheduling tool to allow it to post for you based on pre-defined strategies and texts or even strategies you’ve built, along with having automated responses after hours if you cannot service a client.
Delegation events could also make it easier for the tools I’ve mentioned above to integrate nostr into their toolsets and support nostr as a social media platform.
Programmatic posts.
By creating a delegated event key pair and handing it over to a service, you could connect your account to a host of oracles that can perform programmatic posts for you.
- This could be as simple as connecting to your favourite sports data aggregator and posting the score on your account every time your team plays.
- It could be a game or application that posts your achievements when you unlock a particular nostr badge.
- It could be a P2P platform that triggers a DM or post tagging interested parties when orders go live that fit their requirements.
I want to try delegating an event.
If you’re tired of hearing about the technical explanations and possibilities behind this update and want to give it a go, some early-stage clients will let you try out this NIP as it rolls out to the more popular clients.
Do your own research.
If you’d like to try out Nostr or want to learn more about it, we recommend checking out the following resources to kickstart your research.
Are you on Nostr?
If you are a Nostr user and want to hang out and chat with us or follow our content on your preferred Nostr front end, feel free to add us using our PubKey below.
npub10mxnle348mzv2dnj0ylgz3zu9gceenc29x9fr4m6mnars66j7vxsnkn8mj
The Bitcoin Manual’s Nostr Pubkey
Please give us your notes.
If you have used Nostr, which client do you prefer and why? What apps and services would you like to see form part of the growing ecosystem?
Let us know in the comments down below.
