Nostr Web Client

We cannot use CLTV for proof of burn, because it would allow miners to cheat. This is explained in the whitepaper: https://notary.electrum.org/n/proof-of-burn.pdf (see footnote on page 4)

SatsAndSports 1w ago

So you're saying that miners would delay the notarization transaction until the height specified in the CLTV, so that they can notarize and redeem in the same block

Yes, they could in theory, and that would allow the cheating that we discussed before. But they're not going to delay the notarization transaction for decades, if we're sending it decades into the future

The end users of the system (I mean the users of nostr clients who are consuming nostr events and want to see which events have burned sats associated with them) are looking for reliable notaries, i.e. notaries that get the notarizing transactions into blocks within hours or days (not years or decades).

The end user's software could easily check that the notarization transaction is mined at least N blocks before whichever height is specified/implied by the CLTV or CSV locks

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Discussion

ThomasV 1w ago

It's not about delaying the transaction. If you only rely on CLTV, a spammer can mine a notarization transaction today and pretend that it has been published a long time ago.

But you are right, the software could additionally check that the notarization was mined N blocks before the locktime. This introduces an extra parameter, and it feels a bit like misusing CLTV, but it would indeed allow for longer time delays than CSV.

SatsAndSports 1w ago

The extreme case of this could be very interesting for game theory, leading to just one notary getting a very large monopoly

Imagine a single notary does a deal with all the big mining pools which together control 90% of hashrate

That notary could advertise: "give me 10 sats and I'll notarise it as 50 sats".

As they control 90% of hashrate, they will on average get 45 sats back from those 50, and hence the real cost to the notary is just 5 sats (on average) compared to the 10 sats that they earn from the creator of the nostr content

With CSV, the delay is just about 15 months, and that's short enough that the big notary is happy to wait

I think the only solution is to really make sure that today's miners don't see any value from the burning, so either notarizing to an OP_RETURN, or use CLTV to send it very far in the future

nostr:nprofile1qqsv8c37kh3aqrcckt60tzxcek79fpjghemphhvssyscdh6xq0tu42gpypmhxue69uhky6t5wdshgtnddakx7mnvv93x2tngdakxg6twvaej7qghwaehxw309a3xjarrda5kuetj9eek7cmfv9kz7qgwwaehxw309ahx7uewd3hkctc0g4qea , is this the right npub for Espen?: nostr:nprofile1qqsdx3xlr7k4x0n4kss9mzh26azsdjdjxa7e7gr3gklvck7gxaknj9qppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp08kq57r I think he had the same idea