Using NOSTR Like Bitmessage for Truly Anonymous Messages

By design NOSTR private messaging does not hide non-content metadata. However a simple trick overcomes this limitation and allows one to emulate a flood protocol via NOSTR.

A group of participants must agree upon a public inbox represented by a single nostr npub identity (profile).

All participants pre-encrypt their messages using the PGP public key of the recipient.

Then the pre-encrypted messages are sent from a temporary NOSTR account to the public inbox account.

All users viewing the feed of the public inbox account will get all the encrypted messages, and will be able to decrypt the messages meant for themselves.

In this way it is not possible to link senders and receivers, providing strong privacy.

This is similar to the method of using the newsgroup alt.anonymous.messages.

The public nostr inbox can be created by a single participant, or an anonymous participant can create the public inbox and publish the nostr private key for that inbox so that anyone can use it.

In order to circumvent ISP surveillance the users should employ a anonymizing network such as Tor, I2P, or Ygrdrassil to communicate with the nostr relays.