Why Nostr Today Feels Like Bitcoin In 2012: An Interview With Vitor Pamplona

Bitcoin Magazine

Why Nostr Today Feels Like Bitcoin In 2012: An Interview With Vitor Pamplona

I recently sat down with Vitor Pomplona, creator of Nostr client Amethyst, to discuss how Nostr in 2025 is a lot like what Bitcoin was like in 2012 — a bit rough around the edges, but exciting to use.

Nostr, a decentralized protocol for social media and other forms of communication, is only four years old, and developers are still figuring out how to create the best possible user experience within the clients they’ve created. These clients include apps like Primal (which is comparable to X) to Olas (which is like Instagram) to Yakihonne (which is similar to Substack).

What’s unique about Nostr clients, though, is that users can “zap” (send small amounts of) bitcoin to one another to show appreciation for the content their fellow users have created.

And Pomplona is optimistic that more and more Nostr clients are starting to gain traction, just as Bitcoin began to do so 13 years ago.

“We are starting to see communities being formed and more money being transferred,” Pamplona told Bitcoin Magazine in the interview.

Pomplona acknowledged that part of the purpose of social media is to enable means for users to monetize what they create in ways that they can’t do in their physical environment.

“[Some social media] users want to earn a living,” said Pomplona. “They have hope that they can achieve more with social media than they can alone or in their cities.”

Pamplona believes that Nostr clients can help transform that hope into a reality, and it’s his mission to help users do this.

“That is our end goal: If we can get creators to the point where they can earn a living, we will win as a platform.”

This potential for users to earn a living with Nostr becomes greater everyday, especially as the Nostr user base expands and it continues to grow as the largest bitcoin circular economy in the world.

In creating Amethyst, Pamplona had a vision for a Nostr client that served as an all-in-one app, which was inspired by a plan similar to the one that Elon Musk had for X (formerly Twitter).

“Amethyst came in at the same time that Elon was talking about buying Twitter,” explained Pomplona. “He was like let’s make a mega app out of Twitter, and I went for the same thing.”

While Pomplona understands that Amethyst didn’t quite achieve this, he’s excited that it’s come to play a different role. It serves as a lab for people who are developing new Nostr clients.

“Amethyst is helping everybody kickstart their own applications,” he said. “Olas came from Amethyst.”

Pomplona sees Nostr as a great way to onboard people to Bitcoin, though he doesn’t think this should be the primary goal of Nostr clients.

“The main goal for [Nostr] apps is to get people to do their thing — to get people to be creative, or to talk to their friends or to have a chat with their family,” explained Pomplona.

“No app should ever talk about either Nostr or Bitcoin. They should just be what they are,” he added.

Pamplona believes that, after some time, the app’s users will inevitably start to learn about Nostr’s self-sovereignty Nostr provides when it comes to users being able to control their own data and about Bitcoin.

“[They’ll realize that] it just so happens that the platform helps them to manage their own data, and use best payment protocol we have today.”

And he highlighted that most new users are coming to Nostr because of the freedom and censorship resistance it offers.

“In the past two years, most of the new Nostr users came in because of freedom, because of some censorship in their country,” said Pomplona. “And they learned about Bitcoin after that.”

This post Why Nostr Today Feels Like Bitcoin In 2012: An Interview With Vitor Pamplona first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Frank Corva.