If you clicked on this article, it’s likely that you are familiar with Nostr - the decentralised version of Twitter. If you can’t make head or tail of what I’m talking about, you may refer to my outstanding post on Nostr here.
In spite of my knowledge on Nostr, I haven’t been able to participate in it at all. All this talk about public and private keys kinda left me hanging dry, not to mention the fact that I need to be linked to relays. My ineptitude was not without lack of trying. I signed up with Astral and Anigma, but to no avail.
Fortunately. Damus - a Nostr client - attained approval from the powers-to-be at the Apple Store. So I downloaded it eagerly.
After keying in my username, the app prompted me to click on my public key. You can verify it from the screenshot below.
After that, I was prompted to click on my private key. This I did. Of course I won’t show my private key to you. Anyway, I was in. A newly-minted user of Damus!
Just why am I so interested in Nostr? I’ll come clean here and confess that the reason Nostr is on my radar is that I heard all these wild stories of people posting Lightning invoices on their clients - and having them paid by Internet strangers, no questions asked.
So I posted a Lightning Network invoice on my account. But no knight in shining armor came to give me free sats - because I haven’t gotten down to adding people through their public keys yet.
No matter. Because it turned out that I could receive sats in another way. I learnt that Cowdle, which is similar to Wordle except that you have to guess a six letter word correctly, is on Damus, one of Nostr’s clients. It dishes out sats if you guess a word correctly! Now I’m rather fond of Wordle, so I was really keen to check out Cowdle.
Soon, I was testing my mental acuity by trying to win Cowdle games. I did win a few actually! I registered my Zebedee account, so I immediately received my Cowdle winnings on Zebedee. Found it really cool!
In fact, it’s distracting me from my task of adding people on Damus so that I could post random LN invoices to see if people would pay me just for the heck of it. But Cowdle is occupying my attention these days. Guess it will take time for me to get tired of it.
If you are on Damus, please add me! Don’t worry, I won’t bug you with LN invoices haha
Public key: npub1sw0068askmngfjnt5mq2hwn9eyg2qhzea0ayszmhwp5sy5su3rgs254xm5