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 Maybe proof of work/vanity npubs could be a better solution to spam than PoW notes

PoW notes can really degrade performance/UX  if we want it to be sufficiently high to compete with spammers

But a pow npub is just a one time delay, which is reasonable for a legit user 

Then we expand WoT to trust follows and proof of work? 
 Maybe everyone should use the first few characters of their npub as their username 👀 
 nostr:nprofile1qqspsrz30aj0t9d3u49a9nnh3nxz5443z0j6fv2zd49s5sussvqsmvgpzemhxue69uhhqmr9vfjk66twv45hycfw0puh5qgwwaehxw309ahx7uewd3hkctcpr4mhxue69uhkummnw3ezucnfw33k76twv4ezuum0vd5kzmp0g7l94p ^^ 
 Seems like a better idea 🤔 
 but how would you increase the target difficulty?  
 I think @Cameri was the first person to suggest this but i could be misremembering. I still think spammers would do the PoW as a way to exploit this wot expansion 
 For sure they will do it

But maybe it will slow them down just enough that muting and banning could make a difference? 

And relay operators could more easily share ban lists?

Although maybe not, if a user mines an npub on a phone for 10 mins, a 4090 can probably do that same work in a few seconds :/ 
 yes this was my exact line of thinking which made me abandon pow for most things 
 PoW makes most sense per-message to stop mass spamming, it makes less sense on pubkeys. But even per message is not a silver bullet because you can spin up many machines these days, i dunno 
 PoW can only prevent financially-motivated spam, where the click-through rate isn't amazing. 

It merely slows and limits trolls and ideologically-motivated spam. 
 Slowing down spam is a reasonable goal. Completely eliminating it is likely not realistic. 
 I still think ip rate limiting and banning is way less intrusive and works well. I think i can eliminate 99% of it with enough elbow grease, but will likely require active monitoring for new attacks. I can see why twitter had a bot team -_- 
 IP rate limiting curves spam on a single relay but spammers are sending events to many relays so clients still get spam, and unfortunately relays don’t gossip about this stuff for better or worse. 
 We don’t need to gossip it necessarily, we just need to be working in the same spam ip blocking code. going to write something up for noteguard and hope other public relays run it and improve it 
 what do you think about Pow endorsements?

https://pippellia.com/pippellia/Social+Graph/Navigating+the+social+graph#PoW+endorsement

tldr;

- Alice pays 10$ to a miner
- Miner mines a note that reference Alice's npub
- Alice gets her checkmark so she can defend her audience from impersonators 
 I would have to trust the miner and I shouldn’t need to. 
 worst case is u lose 10$.

It's like a restaurant.  
 Nobody pays a fortune to aws to spam the Nostr... 
 May work, but that was possibly where Satoshi got his original idea for Bitcoin from. Based on previous work, use the idea of POW to eliminate spam email.  It never caught on for spam email. Nor would it because the global warming people would calculate 20KJ to send an email was destroying the planet.

I like the zap to reply type nip needs this.  All my notes would be like that and I am ok with reply guy paying 21 sats for each reply.

#nostr #bitcoinstr #zap 
 lfg⚡⚡ 
 I'm ready 😅 
 same same 🐸 
 I've written about it here:

https://pippellia.com/pippellia/Social+Graph/Navigating+the+social+graph#PoW+endorsement

I think it's a really effective approach because the work can be done by a specialized miner, for a small cost.

"Pay 10$ to get a golden checkmark to protect your audience from impersonators" I think it has reasonable product market fit (see X) 
 The problem is that it is not backward compatible for existing npubs.
One solution could be to use a NIP-32 tag signed with pow referring to the profile. This way, everyone can validate their own npub.
This also allows one to 'whitelist' someone else, for instance someone who has been invited to join Nostr, making onboarding easier and more pleasant. 
 And the pow level can also be updated (increased) over time, if needed (will be necessary). 
 this is what i've been saying for the last 6 months, based on my experience with proof of work shitcoins and building PoW consensus algorithms (since 2018)

vanity addresses are a fairly robust proof because currently anything from about 8 characters of required npub (and it could just as easily be hex, there is a rough 1:1 between them just that hex is 4 bits and npubs are 5 bits per character), takes weeks to generate

there currently isn't any significant tech to accelerate derivation of public keys, so the bitcoin secp256k1 BIP-340 X-only key derivation function is the current baseline for each bruteforce attempt to find such a key

but i think it's inevitable that soon there will be at least AVX/AVX2/AVX512  parallel derivation libraries, i remember a couple of years ago seeing some early work and a paper about this

it's a big calculation using modNscalar functions but this is something that can definitely be parallelized, and i'd expect modern processors could see the ~10 minutes for 5 (25 bits) npub vanity key mine pushed down to 1-2 minutes (my key has 5 vanity characters currently, took me 4 days with btcd/decred schnorr pubkey derivation library, but now with bitcoin core secp256k1 library only 10 minutes)

unlike the signatures, which is one of the things that we benefit from in relay and client implementations from the simpler Schnorr algorithm (it eliminates a division operation, which is the slowest) the pubkey derivation is identical between ecdsa and schnorr and the only actual difference is you leave out the first (left hand side MSB) out, be it 2 or 3 normally, it is not needed for either the signatures or for the ECDH shared secret computation

so, yeah, what i'm gonna say is that it is going to kick the can down the road another few years maybe, but ultimately there will be parallel key miners using AVX and if it really becomes valuable, someone will make FPGAs to increase the parallelism

you will see, once you understand all of that, why i'm saying that it's a dead end and eventually will be forgotten

to me you all look like proof of work shitcoiners talking about this stuff, circa 5 years ago, before it became obvious that the game theory causes consolidation of proof of work mining power and why we have the zero to one principle of money (and ultimately languages, in the internet era) 
 All true, but I think you overestimate how many Nostr-spammers have that skillset.

People with that skillset have much more profitable things to do with their time.


Threat modelling needs to be step 1. 
 While I do agree with you about people having much more profitable things to do with their skill set…

It only takes one obsessed, very powerful person and one black hat on their payroll (which they have, in abundance) 
 the replyguy kinda ends the discussion as far as i'm concerned

causing trouble is cheap on nostr right now, that is a threat that needs to be considered seriously since there is not so much risk of a profitable scam attack at this point

we have to raise the price above thet most determined seeker of lulz 
 Thats why I think there should be a minimum of PoW on every single note, some energy required to post whatever, doesn’t matter if you are a legitimate user or spammer. 
 i wish i didn't hear this so often from people

if it's worth money, it won't be within reach of regular users

if it's not worth money, nobody is going to spam 
 Is reply guy is making money? The cost is so cheap today that even the amount of money lost is peanuts to the average spammer.

I’m advocating for raising the cost floor, not keep it free/cheap as it is today. Not advocating for eliminating spam forever.

I think all here can spend a couple days or weeks (slowly) mining a profile event with some PoW. Whether spammers can do it faster does not matter, they will have to pay the cost for every pubkey which raises their cost floor. They will need to spend in expensive equipment and spend energy to do it every single time they need a new pubkey.

What we have today is zero or near-zero cost.

Also if you don’t want to hear other people’s opinions try getting off the internet ffs and cut the 💩  
 I think its better to have PoW on your profile than on pubkeys. You can re-mine your profile to a higher difficulty if needed but your vanity pub would be stuck. 
 And it doesn’t need clients to mine every single event all the time, hopefully just once in a long time. 
 We have paid relays here, I have no problem to pay for each note a couple of sats 
 Why would PoW notes degrade performance? The compute to verify a signature alone is far higher then verifying the PoW portion.

Or do you mean on the creation side? If so, determined spammers will eventually do that too raising the stakes of the cat and mouse game.

We will only get so far with simple reactionary filters to low effort spammers. 
 Anyone talking about "degrading performance" sounds glowie to me.

I prioritize censorship resistance over where my loading speeds are at in the modern-day range of loading speeds.

People lived with dial-up once. 
 Well, I'm so glad I bought vanitynpub.com awhile back 🤣 
 Total newb here but could the pow on notes be ‘mined’ during an idle time or overnight so in the morning you’ve got x notes ready to go? 
 i want to keep my current npub but it’s definitely a good solution 😭
I hope I can smoothly rotate 
 You're already well in the web of trust, no need 
  smoothly rotate 😎 
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