NextBlock City Lexicon
Every NextBlock City term defined: citizen, block, the ATTN Protocol, sovereign time, and the rest of the city vocabulary.
- Citizen
- A person who has completed NIP-42 authentication with a city relay and signs their own events. Citizens own their attention and earn bitcoin for it.
- Block
- A citizen's permanent address in the city, written handle.block-height, where the height is the Bitcoin block at which the citizen was minted.
- Sovereign
- The first citizen: the singleton identity authorized to act for the city and to sign block-time events.
- npub
- A citizen's public identity, a bech32-encoded Nostr public key. The city speaks npub, never raw hex.
- Vault
- A multi-key, NIP-49 encrypted Nostr secret key stored locally and unlocked by passphrase or biometric. Signing requires an unlocked vault.
- Node Runner
- A citizen who runs city infrastructure and enforces consensus, the city's equivalent of a Bitcoin full-node operator.
- City Protocol
- The City Protocol (CITY-01), the Nostr event spec for block-time and city identity, event kinds 38808 through 38848.
- ATTN Protocol
- NextBlock City's attention marketplace, where advertisers propose attention events and citizens are paid in bitcoin for their engagement.
- rATTN
- Received attention: the settlement receipt proving a citizen gave attention to a promotion, the unit the ATTN marketplace pays out on.
- Ketab Protocol
- The Ketab Protocol (KETAB-01) for publishing books on Nostr, the spec behind the city Library.
- Dynasty Protocol
- The Dynasty Protocol for sovereign genealogy and family-lineage charts.
- Gatehouse
- The onboarding surface, reached at /enter, where a person connects a wallet and becomes a citizen.
- Billboard
- The city's broadcast surface, where attention is bought and sold under the ATTN Protocol.
- Corner
- The most local social surface in the city, a small room where a handful of citizens gather.
- Neighborhood
- A mid-level social surface that groups corners into a wider community.
- Skyline
- The city-wide view: the broadest social surface, where the whole city is visible at once.
- Relay
- A Nostr server that validates, indexes, and stores city events. Citizens choose which relays to join; relay operators decide protocol.
- Library
- The city's reading surface: books published on Nostr under the Ketab Protocol, free to read and zappable to the author.
- Block Height
- The city's clock. Events are stamped by Bitcoin block height, roughly one tick every ten minutes, never by wall-clock time.
- Bitcoin Time
- Sovereign time: the city measures now by the Bitcoin block height, so no central party decides what now is.
- Meridian
- The city's block-stamped record of the Bitcoin price over time, denominated in sats.
- Zap
- A bitcoin payment sent between citizens over the Lightning Network, recorded as a Nostr zap receipt.
- Strike
- The empire rail: a regulated Lightning and fiat on-ramp citizens use to receive and send bitcoin without running their own node.
- Telescope
- The city's mapping of Bitcoin block height to astronomical cycles, surfaced in the Observatory.
- C.H.A.O.S. Cartel
- The centralized attention-harvesting adversary whose model NextBlock City exists to replace.
- Glass
- A UI convention: the NextBlock logo button toggles a page's controls (the HUD) on and off.
- Pulse
- A UI convention: the identity card that transitions a citizen's hero image from full-bleed to contained.