Once a Nostr private key leaks, how do you mark the identity as dead — permanently, verifiably, and in a way the attacker cannot undo? We examined every existing mechanism in the protocol. None of them work. Here is what could.
We searched 41 million Nostr events for private keys published in plaintext. After filtering out noise, 38 real accounts with over 21,000 combined followers are actively using a compromised key with no signs of awareness.
A deep technical comparison of two open-source projects that index the Nostr network — BigBrotr (Python/PostgreSQL relay observatory) and Pensieve (Rust/ClickHouse event archive). Same network, different questions, radically different architectures.
There’s a wealth of data you can extract from a Nostr relay — why settle for less? Build a fully NIP-66 compliant monitor in under 80 lines of Python.
Dumping every event from a Nostr relay should be simple — pick your filters, set a time window, iterate. With BigBrotr’s stream_events, it is.
A technical deep dive into BigBrotr’s architecture — eight services, ~18,000 lines of Python, 25 stored procedures, 11 materialized views, and the design decisions behind a Nostr relay observatory.
