• Nostr is a decentralized communication protocol that uses public/private key pairs to identify users.
• This solves the lack of control over user identities, but brings with it risks such as keys being lost or compromised.
• A scheme is needed to rotate from one keypair to another in a way that is verifiable and discoverable for other users.

What is Nostr?

Nostr is a decentralized communication protocol that uses public/private key pairs to identify users. It functions as a tight binding between the actual user and how they are identified by others, thereby preventing any relay server from unbinding those two things and giving someone’s identifier to another user.

Risks of Using Nostr

The use of public/private key pairs introduces all of the problems of key management that someone possessing a private key runs into. Keys can be lost and keys can be compromised, leaving users without any customer support if such an event were to occur.

Scheme for Key Rotation

A scheme for users to rotate from one keypair to another in a way that is verifiable and discoverable for other users needs to be implemented in order for the guarantees provided by Nostr to remain intact. There exists a proposal from developer fiatjaf which suggests using BIP-32 wallets with an extended version of HD wallets where each subsequent level creates an address or identity instead of just an address. This would allow anyone who knows their current identity key pair access to their old identity keys as well, allowing them to prove when they rotated their keys so that others know it was legitimately them who sent messages or conducted transactions before and after rotation occurred.

Decentralization Issues

The implementation of this scheme could potentially result in reliance on centralized platforms such as Twitter where individuals are not in control of their own identity verification when rotating keys, thus undermining the entire concept behind decentralizing identities with Nostr in the first place.

Conclusion

All in all, it seems clear that some sort of solution must be implemented within the system itself if it wants to achieve its goal providing secure decentralized identity authentication while still maintaining control over user identities at all times – even during times when those identities change due to rotation events occurring within the system itself.