Why require PoW if not for rate limiting or spam control?
In any case this doesn't improve anything because attackers have lots of stolen CPU botnets at their disposal. This will only waste user battery and time without gaining anything.
Discussion
Users aren’t meant to do proof-of-work… indeed, that is not a viable defense strategy like Adam Back originally intended due to botnets et al.
The ingenious innovation was when Satoshi applied Adam’s proof-of-work spam deflection to miners (servers)… rather than to users sending emails as Adam Back intended.
Satoshi created the first long-lasting user-server model that’s decentralized — problem is it’s very expensive to store data in blocks.
The whole point of nostr that makes it distinct from IPFS is users no longer need to spin up a server to participate — nor do they need to expend tons of computationally power or bandwidth… User costs on nostr should remain low like they are for a bitcoin user’s lightwallet via SPV.
Not for us to decide. We are just a client. If somebody creates a relay for the rich only, they can enable proof of work to make it happen.
They are free to make bad choices. I'm only pointing out the underlying logic is flawed. It punishes ordinary users without gaining anything.
pow is basically a desktop users only filter