Do you ever feel like the days of wide-open “wild west” exploration on social media are long gone? Have our feeds and timelines been reduced to corporate-controlled aggregations of hyper-targeted ads and content created by influencers calculated to bring in clicks that they can monetise? Has the “social” aspect been drained and turned into a vanilla experience that is aimed at being palatable to the widest audience possible?
Nostr is an open-source protocol built from the ground up for users who want to reclaim ownership over their personal data and share it however they choose. Its technology provides users with uncensorable posting and control over how their data is distributed, making customisation easy. If you’re looking for more freedom online than you’ve had before, then a Nostr client might be up your alley, but it does come with a few caveats.
Since anyone can run the nostr protocol, create a private and public key pair and start posting, it does encourage a fair bit of spam. Without the ability to censor users, there need to be incentive structures put into place that make acting like a degenerate spammer, shitcoin scammer or annoying troll a barrier to entry.
But you can’t precisely thread the needle on these things and have freedom and censorship resistance without opening the door to bad actors and destructive behaviour. If nostr didn’t stop spammers, bot accounts and fake accounts from trying to misuse the network, the next best option would be to provide filtering methods and obvious identification.
Improvements like NIP-05 verification, paid relay subscriptions, and now badges will go a long way in helping nostr users make sense of all the chaos.
Badges are not NIP-05 verifications.
NIP-05 is one method of creating a unique identification method for your account; you can select a custom handle and assign it to either your website domain or the domain of a third-party service.
- thebtcmanual@getably.com – unique ID with a third-party domain
- TBM@thebitcoinmanaul.com – unique ID with own domain
Once you’ve claimed a NIP-05 ID, no one can run a copy of that same handle, so users who understand this can quickly differentiate between anyone who spins up a copy cat account with your username, copied profile picture and profile details as we see on traditional social media.
NIP-05 makes it easier to check if a public key (npub) is associated with a specific handle that cannot be copied, but it’s not the most intuitive for users to understand. In addition, you can always change your NIP-05 to another domain whenever you feel like so this doesn’t lend itself to being the most trustworthy feature, but it’s a start.
Badges are a completely different way of adding custom identifiers to your account and can be used with accounts that have a NIP-05 ID set or ones that do not; it is up to the badge creator to decide on the terms and conditions.
Take accountability for your account.
Using Nostr, you’re the only one who has access to that account as long as you hold the private key and you lay claim to all the data that the private key can decrypt. All your posts, replies, followers and profiles you follow are an example of data stored and unlocked with your private key, and you remain in control of that data.
If you’re removed from a particular relay or client, you can migrate your data to another service with as simple an action as logging in, and you can keep doing what you do best, you little troll.
As nostr users have begun to test out the limits of these freedoms, along with anonymity
The idea behind badges is not only to flex your allegiance to a specific flag but to add ways to customise your profile, to indicate your certain interests or to showcase your trustworthiness as badge creators endorse you. It adds a new identifier to quickly discern if someone is a legitimate account and sunk cost to accounts to act as a responsible nostr user, should they wish to acquire a certain badge.
Sure, you can go scorched earth and ignore all these “incentives”, or you can participate in communities you like and build up an account that garners a good reputation. It also makes it much harder for copycat accounts to mimic your account since they’ll never be able to acquire all the badges you own.
We need to talk about your flair.
Once badges are enabled on your account, you can go wild; you can choose to be as expressive as you like or ignore the “current” nostr thing entirely. But at Nostr, we encourage you not to limit your flair. If you want to showcase the minimum amount, that’s fine, but you’re free to express yourself in whichever form pleases you.
What are nostr badges?
Badges, Profile Badges or Badge Awards MAY be awarded by the badge creator in recognition, in gratitude, for participation, or in appreciation of a specific goal, task or cause. Any user can mint a badge, set their requirements to acquire a badge, award a badge or remove a badge from a user.
While the user who receives the badge (added to the badge list of npubs) may choose to decorate their profiles with badges for fame, notoriety, recognition, and support from badge issuers they deem reputable.
To give you an example of a badge, below is one of the first tests, a Verified Human Badge.
What would be needed to create a badge?
Nostr badges are a new event that users with an account can broadcast to relays to create and assign to different public keys. To create a badge, a user (badge creator/minter) must specify the following information.
- Short description – A name and short summary of the badge.
- Long description – Provide more detail about the badge, what it represents, who is part of this group and even how to acquire one, and the badge issuer.
- Images – High resolution and alternative sizes that clients would need to render badges in different situations correctly.
Either nostr clients would support this new event in their profile options, or badge-specific clients/websites could be spun up to support the minting of specific badges.
How would badges work?
Any Nostr user can choose to mint a badge that will be tied to their public key as the badge creator. This user’s private key will be the only key that has access to the list that awards users a badge. To add another user to the badge list, as a badge creator, you would update your list to include the public keys you feel qualify for the badge.
Once you’ve broadcasted the updated list, the users on this list will then be able to unlock that badge and choose to add it to their profile.
The number of badges a public key (account) can be awarded is unlimited; you could be assigned hundreds, if not thousands, of badges as the feature gains popularity. While the badges are soul bound to your account, it doesn’t mean you’re forced to showcase all the badges you’ve qualified for or earned.
The Profile Badge event allows individual users to accept or reject awarded badges, as well as choose the display order of badges on their profiles.
What would you use badges for?
Now that you understand how badges work and where they would be found, let’s take a look at some of the use cases.
Joining a community.
There are plenty of sub-communities in the bitcoin space, and as nostr expands, there will surely be many people with niche interests that require a little bit of discovery to find.
If you’re a Lightning node runner and you’re looking to find other people who also run nodes, either to chat about their set-up, open channels, or troubleshoot issues with your node, wouldn’t it be lovely to find experts with real experience to engage with in real-time?
Lightning node runners could have their own badges that users can qualify for by creating a channel with one of the group members. Badges can make it easy for you to find communities and community members.
Joining a paid service.
Let’s say you’ve joined a paid relay; the relay owners who have whitelisted your public key can also add your key to their own badge list, so people can quickly see which relays you are posting to and can sign up to those relays if they want to ensure that they always get access to your posts.
Attending an event.
Let’s say you finally decided to brave the local bitcoin meetup scene in your area, and you made some friends along the way, but you didn’t go around getting people’s contacts. You can let your attendance speak for itself with Nostr Badges!
An event coordinator could mint a badge that any attendees can apply for and allow you to showcase the events and conferences that you have attended while providing event organisers with a branding opportunity to recruit new attendees.
It’s an engaging way of showing support for local movements and keeping in touch with the friends you make along the way.
Unlocking an achievement.
Badges can be awarded as encouragement for engagement or certain user actions, such as:
- Reaching a specific follower count.
- Making your first P2P trade with a nostr user.
- Performing your first zap.
- NIP-05 verifying with one particular service provider.
- Using a certain Lightning Wallet for your profile payment address.
- Using a particular client.
- Reaching a certain amount of comments or posts.
Working for a company.
Suppose you’re an employee of a bitcoin company, such as an exchange, a wallet or node manufacturer; brands can spin up badges using their official account and encourage staff to add them to their Nostr profiles, so people know you’re a legitimate spokesperson for the company.
All badges are not created equal.
Before you run off and start collecting your gym badges like Ash Ketchum, remember that there will be fake gym leaders along the way offering you badges that don’t hold as much weight. A badge value is built on the issuer’s reputation and the community that rallies around the badge.
While it might be fun to collect as many badges as you can, you might want to consider the legitimacy of the badges you add to your profile.
Also, beware of those trying to “sell” you a badge, and check with other badge owners to see if payment is required to secure a particular badge. You don’t want to be scammed into acquiring a paid Jpeg; you can leave that madness for the NFT crowd.
Why I might not always see my badges.
Badges might be merged to the nostr protocol, but that does not mean clients must honour every feature in the underlying protocol. While Clients should attempt to render the most appropriate badge thumbnail according to the number of badges chosen by the user and the space available, clients could either choose to ignore badges or only offer them in a limited fashion.
Remember, each client is different, run by a different team, and might have different ideas of how to use badges. Clients have also made certain design trade-offs based on the medium they would like to service (App/Mobile or Desktop), and this could impact the way badges are discovered and displayed.
If you’ve earned a badge and you don’t see it on your preferred client, fear not; it might be assigned to your public key but might only be visible on specific clients, or you’ve hit the badge limit for that client.
Evolving at breakneck speeds.
Nostr leverages open-source development with developers and community members in constantly discussing issues and demanding new features from clients and relay operators. If you struggle to keep up with the ever-changing pool of features available on Nostr, Don’t worry—you’re not alone!
In the last few, Nostr has seen substantial growth in its development contributions, with Badges being the latest NIP in a long list of planned protocol updates. If you would like to keep up with
But we’ll try to keep you up to date with all the latest nostr tech talk and developments.
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? How do you find Nostr followers? Are you excited for badges? What would the first badge you’d like to see?
Let us know in the comments down below.
