using a relay for mostly small notes as a network tranport is a dumb idea unless you can make people pay for this use case in which case specialist nodes will be made just for doing this
creating a websocket based for-pay relay scheme could actually work for short messages though, just need to wrap the events in three layers for each hop and a payment nut in each one for the relaying service and no spam problem and anonymous relaying
> NWC has entered the chat
it must use micro accounts, you can't pay as you go without revealing yourself
https://github.com/indra-labs/indra has a heap of code around accounting and the layered encryption required
the sender provides the keys as the payment preimage over lightning
ah yes, it does require you to run somewhat unconventionally configured lightning nodes that can receive keysend/AMP payments, this isolates the payment from the user's location via TLV onions of LN
it's a mostly complete implementation, there's nothing really stopping you scooping out parts of it, it was designed as a full blown network transport but anonymised relaying is a subset of what it is capable
at that point use i2p no?
if you have lightning nodes attached to the relay that can receive keysend/AMP payments you can pay anonymously and load credit on a special pair of keys (you create and provide two secret keys to the sender that identify your messages as being associated with the account
then you construct 3 hop chains (or more) based on this and each goes to a different relay, the message is encrypted using the account key recognisable by its matching pubkey in the header and the relay then knows it can forward it as it's paid for, no spam problem
this is a perfect use case for it as a way to enable nostr relays to act as VPNs for paying users
anyway, just check out what i invented, of course i hope it gets used, i spent almost a whole year working on that, but didn't get to the actual testing phase, it's just a heap of unit tests with virtual relays and an encryption protocol and session payment protocol all written and tested
https://github.com/indra-labs/indranet - this is what i'm referring to
