How this book is organized

The NIPs in this book are the same documents you would find in the nostr-protocol/nips repository. I have not rewritten them. I have grouped them by what they help you do, and written a short introduction to each group.

Start with the overview if you are new. NIP-01 is the protocol. Everything else is optional. Skip around once you know the event shape.

Unrecommended NIPs are still here. You will meet them in old clients, old events, and old blog posts. The chapter intro will say so, briefly, and point at whatever replaced them.

Chapters

• Overview — What Nostr is, and NIP-01, the basic protocol.
• Communication — Notes, articles, comments, media, drafts, and messages.
• Social — Follows, identity, reactions, reposts, badges, polls, and bookmarks.
• Groups — Public chat, relay-based groups, chats, and forum threads.
• Moderation — Labels, lists, reports, sensitive content, and proof of work.
• Relays — How relays describe themselves, authenticate clients, sync, and get found.
• Clients — URIs, bech32 encodings, timestamps, and a BLE experiment.
• Payments — Lightning zaps, wallet connect, Cashu, and peer-to-peer orders.
• Third Parties — Gift wrap, remote signers, and other services that act on your behalf.
• Application Features — Calendars, live streams, wikis, files, git, and other app kinds.
• Security — Key handling, payload encryption, HTTP auth, and requests to vanish.
• Developers — Browser and Android signers, unknown events, and app handlers.