Under the hood

How Deadwax finds music

Nostr is the public index: signed lists of what people are willing to share. The audio never goes near it. None of this is required reading, but the plumbing is here if you want to check it.

Nostr is Deadwax’s public discovery layer and encrypted negotiation channel. Audio bytes are never uploaded to Nostr relays.

What Type Is a Track?

A shared track is a custom parameterized-replaceable event of kind 30421. The event is signed by the seeder’s Deadwax identity.

Kind: 30421

Identity: the d and x tags contain the full-file SHA-256

Tags: t=napstr, filename, byte size, MIME type and alt text

JSON: the indexed filename, audio format, MIME type and byte size

Not included: audio bytes, local file path, Tor address or transfer capability

Republishing the same 30421 + d pair replaces that seeder’s previous record. Removing a share publishes a replacement marked deleted.

Deadwax Event Map

Kind	Purpose	Visibility
0	Deadwax profile name, description and picture	Public
10050	NIP-17 inbox relay list	Public
30421	Signed track catalogue record	Public
30422	Expiring batches of file IDs currently being seeded	Public
30425	Signed playlist of track file IDs	Public
30427	Album cover claim keyed by artist and album	Public
NIP-17	Download request, refusal, onion address and capability	Encrypted gift wrap
1984	NIP-56 catalogue reports	Public and signed

Seeder heartbeats expire after ten minutes and are refreshed every four minutes. Search groups identical SHA-256 IDs and ranks tracks by active seeders.

From Search to Download

Deadwax fetches public 30421 catalogue events and live 30422 heartbeats.
The downloader sends selected seeders an encrypted NIP-17 request containing only a request ID and file ID.
A seeder replies with its private app-session Tor onion and a random, short-lived per-file capability inside NIP-17.
The audio transfer then leaves Nostr entirely and continues over Tor.

What Is Public?

Public: profile metadata, filenames, descriptive metadata, SHA-256 file IDs, reports, and which profiles advertise each file ID.
Encrypted: download requests, onion addresses and capabilities.
Local: the Nostr secret key, filesystem paths and audio contents.

A Nostr relay can normally see the IP address connecting to that relay, along with public catalogue activity and encrypted-message timing. NIP-17 hides the message plaintext; it does not make the relay connection itself anonymous. Deadwax stores its dedicated Nostr key in the operating-system keyring.