"Reputation is key in social media, and provides a natural solution to many technical problems." hodlbod
Working my way through Building Nostr and came across that quote. I'm curious about how the reputational properties on Nostr could be used to facilitate things like payments and NFT's off-chain. For NFT's specifically, would it be enough to have an event posted by an artist which says "this thing <image hash> is now owned by <purchaser id> - signed <artist id>". The classic issue is that an artist could secretly issue many such messages for the same image but is that really a problem? The value would be that an artist has a reputation which people value and they would absolutely loose that rep and destroy the scarcity of their art if they started being sneaky. Also, if I purchased something, I would expect that event signaling my purchase to be shared broadly and immediately. I just wonder if you even really need block chain for that use case, for collectables.
Same with payments in some way, if I want to sell something small, use the coffee example, I think it would be enough for a user to post an "IOU 500 sats" maybe with a hash of the payment in the mempool, then they can move along before any confirmations (which is the slow part in bitcoin if I understand this correctly). You could imagine over time it would be possible to programatically determine a 'credit' score based on this history - if you have never used it then you are higher risk, if you have used this and every block you ever referenced in an IOU has been settled, you are low risk, if you have lots of blocks which never made it through because you do something sneaky like submit another block that double spends then you get a high risk.
I love nostr, I think it's very simple and in some ways I think it can help solve some tricky technical problems by making them reputational concerns vs technical concerns.