I tried reading up on Nostr the other day, and came away finding it unpalatable, mainly because my understanding was that upvotes are tied to crypto.

The way I read it, you need some sort of crypto currency to pay for upvoting a post, from which I inferred that the only reasonable gauge for a posts popularity (upvotes) was intrinsically tied to money (and crypto-money, at that).

Is this a reasonable assessment, or did I misunderstand something?

EDIT: I was wrong, and stand corrected 👍