⚡️ Nostr-over-BT

nostr-over-bt is a high-performance Node.js library that bridges the Nostr protocol with the BitTorrent network. It enables a hybrid transport layer where standard Nostr metadata lives on relays, while heavy content and long-term event storage are offloaded to a decentralized P2P swarm.

🚀 Key Features

• Hybrid Delivery: Seamlessly fallback between Nostr Relays and BitTorrent Swarms.
• Infinite Scalability: Offload 99%+ of relay bandwidth to the swarm. Perfect for large media, long-form content, and viral posts.
• Zero-Relay Discovery: Uses BitTorrent DHT (BEP-44) to find user feeds purely via their public key—no relay connection required for bootstrapping.
• P2P Web of Trust (WoT): Automatically crawls and discovers events from "friends-of-friends" by traversing the social graph through the DHT.
• Deterministic Identity: Derive your P2P seeding address directly from your Nostr secret key.
• Relay Optimized: Includes a reference relay that acts as a "Seeding Bridge," automatically backing up every incoming event to the global BitTorrent DHT.

🎯 What it Achieves

The goal of this library is to solve the two biggest scaling challenges in the Nostr ecosystem:

1. The Bandwidth Bottleneck: Standard relays are expensive to run because they bear the full cost of data delivery. nostr-over-bt transforms the relay into a notifier, leaving the heavy lifting to the peers who are actually consuming the content.
2. Relay Silos: In standard Nostr, if a publisher and a follower are on different relays, they cannot see each other. nostr-over-bt creates a Global P2P Index via the DHT, ensuring that as long as you have a user's pubkey, you can find their content anywhere in the world.

📦 Installation

npm install nostr-over-bt

📖 Documentation

• API Reference: Detailed documentation of all classes and methods.
• P2P Discovery: Deep dive into the DHT-based discovery protocol.
• Development Guide: Instructions for setting up and contributing to the project.

🛠 Quick Start (Client)

import { TransportManager, IdentityManager, HybridTransport, NostrTransport, BitTorrentTransport } from 'nostr-over-bt';

// 1. Setup Identity
const id = IdentityManager.fromNostrSecretKey(MY_SECRET_KEY);

// 2. Initialize Transports
const bt = new BitTorrentTransport({ dht: true });
const nostr = new NostrTransport(['wss://relay.damus.io']);
const manager = new TransportManager(new HybridTransport(nostr, bt));

// 3. Publish Hybrid Event
const event = { kind: 1, content: "Hello decentralized world!", ... };
const result = await manager.publish(event); 
// Result contains { magnetUri, relayStatus }

🖥 Relay Integration

Relay operators can use the library to become "Seeding Nodes," ensuring that all events passing through their relay are permanently archived in the BitTorrent network. See examples/relay-server/server.js for a full implementation.

📊 Performance

| Mode | Relay Bandwidth | Reach | Scalability | | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | | Standard Nostr | Linear $O(N)$ | Relay-dependent | Medium | | BT-Nostr | Constant $O(1)$ | Universal (DHT) | Infinite |

📜 License

LGPL-2.1