it wouldn't. spammers can do pow better than normal clients
How better? Better machines or what?
people writing spam bots are probably nerds with more computing resources than just a person on their phone
How about some initial sats payment that is automatically reimbursed if the relay operator does not decide to slash it? That would allow for much higher prepayment but come at low cost for honest users
I think that was the so Sphinx chat model. You give up sats to join a group and send messages and if the chat room owner decided it was spam they could keep the sats.
Then you'd trust the good intentions of the host.
yeah, but it is an opt-in model and these things can be handled on the social layer through reputation. Additionally, we are not talking about huge sums. A deposit of 5$ per user would already kill almost all spammers, the individual loss in a rug is low.