I don’t think that negates what I am saying, it’s a fact that compute is cheap, there’s a reason it’s used in Bitcoin.
My point is that we should try to make spamming less attractive. The cumulative costs for a spammer become significant over time, whilst not so for the typical user. PoW is not useless: if it takes a spammer 20 minutes to send 1,000 replies vs 1 second, that is still slowing them down. That’s 20 minutes of high compute accumulating on the spammers bill.
Many users won’t even need to do PoW if they only care to be received by those that follow them, but a spammer has an incentive for their content to be seen by as many as possible. Mining could happen in the background while the user does other things, or by a DVM, or none at all (if you target your followers/WoT).
What we have now is free-for-all, a near-zero energy cost for users and spammers alike, absolutely no physical limits imposed all while having the technology to do so.
I’ll say it again: it’s a combination of measures that is needed to deal with spam, not a one-size fits all. WoT is great until it’s not, relay hopping and tagging is great until there’s no relays to run to.
What is spam?
It may be difficult to approach a consensus on the definition of spam... However, hammer the obvious spam ruthlessly while keeping in mind that a course/code correction may be necessary later to ensure nostr is "a public square".... Think of it as a physical people: thinking, speaking and conversing ... The natural physical limits of human communication/interaction can surely be somehow defined and applied as some type of publicly-known standardized nostr spam filter? If breached, you npub is basically nuked and you have to start over??
Probably would be difficult to make the parameters simple but could make the spec quite wide to cut out the worst offenders...
Thank you devs!
A few issues. PoW doesn’t prevent targeted attacks. As an attacker, I could target all big accounts, or just new users. Or just their DMs.
Also hard to link PoW to visibility. Same hash cost whether a spam message is seen by one or 10,000.
I’m also worried about PoW and phone batteries. 🪫
I’ve been thinking whether we could create a sponsor model. Would there be a way to onboard new users into the WoT through an existing user (their sponsor). A one-time onboarding step may be better than ongoing PoW for every message.
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