Oddbean new post about login | logout Does storing images on relays pose any additional risk to them?
Storage costs. Bitstream is designed to pay relays as they deliver data, bit by bit over Lightning. The file chunk itself is released as a preimage to settle the Lightning invoice. That should help with the increased overhead for relays. Static monthly payments from users has many relays going out of business — they underestimate operating costs.
Have you considered a scenario where seeding relays with illegal images could quickly undermine the entire network? I actually think centralized services are great at handling media because they have more tools at their disposal to moderate for illegal content. I thought that having media live on relays could potentially put them in legal hot water so to speak. But with text only, there is a much lesser risk of being taken offline. That and it keeps relays leaner and easier to spin up. Or were you thinking only some relays handling media?
Being a centralized storage provider does not improve your ability to moderate illegal content, funding does. Relays making tons of money should certainly provide them with the funding to prune illegal content like nostr.build does. Many new AI tools are growing for this very purpose. These will only proliferate over the next decade. Although, I agree that not all relays should be forced to host files — only the relays capable of sustaining it. Everything is modular and voluntary, but we cannot rely on the centralized web forever!
One problem is, books can be illegal in some places as well. If some text is illegal, the same logic can say that relay should not host text as well.
Therefore, whether relay should media is not a social/legal problem, it's a technology problem. Whether relay should exist a social/legal problem.
Not really the same I think. Books being illegal in a few countries doesn’t phase the network. Child porn being illegal (I assume) in all countries could have an impact on the network. It’s probably not a major concern though as you wouldn’t have relays broadcasting the same media everywhere but it could impact the largest and most popular relays. Just thinking out loud …
Good point. Illegal text is certainly much less than illegal multi-media.
Data as the preimage. Damn that's a really cool idea.
The data is encrypted and the decryption key is the preimage. But that’s very difficult to explain so I usually give people the simplified version above first^ Robin could go more in-depth. It started initially as him suggesting using the data as the preimage, then we realized preimages couldn’t be reused and evolved it over the last few months.
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