Nostr Web Client

PoW is essential to Bitcoin but PoW doesn't stop spam, it didn't take off when it was Hashcash and it also doesn't stop spam in Bitcoin, see inscriptions for example.

> then why aren't they spamming nostr right now while the cost to do so is absolutely free?

They are. When I turn off the Web of Trust filter in Nostur I see spam all the time, if you are not seeing it you are relying on your relays doing the filtering for you. Add relay.nostr.band and you will have spam in many replies (with WoT filter disabled).

arkinox 2y ago

I think there were other more critical reasons why hashcash wasn't adopted.

Yes, there is spam on nostr now. I'm saying that if POW would be required, the amount of spam on nostr would only decrease, not increase as some have said.

You may see inscriptions as spam on the bitcoin blockchain, but they are not spam (worthless) to the people who pay substantial material costs to create them. Spam has a cost, and raising the cost via POW (or mempool fees) will reduce the amount of spam that people are capable of producing.

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Discussion

Fabian 2y ago

The cost you mention for PoW only matters for protecting the history of transactions, it is irrelevant for spam, it actually protects the history of spam as well. PoW works because someone trying to redo transactions would have to have more PoW than the cumulative PoW of all others.

There is no cumulative PoW in nostr, unless you are proposing to turn nostr into a blockchain but that sounds absurd to me.

Maybe I'm missing something so don't let me stop you, if you find a way that works I'll even implement it in Nostur, but I'm not convinced right now.

Just a coincidental anecdote, yesterday I was trying another nostr website and was wondering why the submit button was so slow, when I looked at the produced JSON I understood why when I found a nonce in there 🤷

arkinox 2y ago

Respectfully, this is a very narrow view of the utility of POW. Innovation requires experimentation. POW is not necessarily ONLY useful for bitcoin just because bitcoin is the only proven use case thus far.

j 2y ago

If this is the only reason for POW, why did satoshi add POW to the genesis block?