I think ASICs are good. You don't need to own one, you can just rent one for a few sats over lighting.
Rent google's cpus on https://powrelay.xyz/work.html
Hey, any thoughts in using RandomX (CPU-only POW algo) for these kind of things? So that in long term more clients can provide their own POW and not have ASICs messing things up.
https://github.com/tevador/RandomX/blob/master/doc/design.md
Discussion
Yeah but if you need to pay sats to an ASIC provider, why not just pay them to the relay directly instead?
To me the beauty of PoW based social media is that people wouldn't even need to "pay", it could be a "free" but still quality experience like current social media is.
Of course, everything needs to be paid for one way or another, but paying with your CPU cycles could perhaps be a more seamless experience than sats, on some scenarios.
Agree.
Maybe you could start a nostr POW service (like https://powrelay.xyz/work.html) that accepts monero (or RandomX mining) as payment in exchange for nostr POW.
That's the beauty of POW, since it's trivial to verify, it's also trivial to outsource.