lol, using AVX2 hash grinding is not difficult to set up, and if you want to go to a little more effort you can turn an old S9 into a hash grinder
unfortunately i think that once there's money in it, your little antispam mechanism is toast
LFG Tigs, the PoW is calculated on your computer in a very naive way rn so it will take a VERY long time for Epic and Legendary. In the future we could use a paid PoW provider, nostr:npub1fjqqy4a93z5zsjwsfxqhc2764kvykfdyttvldkkkdera8dr78vhsmmleku suggested this and I would gladly implement it client side.
Discussion
I looked into this, bitcoin miners are not designed to calculate a single sha256 sum so I don't think they can be adapted for nostr POW.
And yes, but you just need a difficulty adjustment and all is good.