Listening to latest #[0]​ “what bitcoin did” pod has me thinking:

Shadow relays: An attackable surface for government actors. This specifically came up with regards to relays in the Arab world, but could have a broader utility.

1. We create pay-to-post relays. This is the attackable surface. Government agents and bots must pay (in #bitcoin 🙂) to attack posts they find undesirable.

2. Real authentic human(e) users are whitelisted on the pay-to-post relays so that the relays present as high usage and the bots have something to attack. There are many potential verification methods, and this concept can be dynamic.

2b. Alternatively, we could have all users pay to post but have the relays pay the real human(e) users back through zaps from anonymous accounts. Some disguise might be necessary. Perhaps we could even zap the bot proceeds to the real people.

3. All users of this relay (including bots) each receive a unique API key as a DM upon first joining. They access the relay with a unique relay link: wss://relay.com/api=API_KEY

4. The relay presents a challenge to the client which must be signed by the private key of the subscriber. Failure to sign correctly results in receiving a global unfiltered feed.

5. Whitelisted users see only other whitelisted users posts. The paid bot posts are visible only to non-whitelisted users.

SO WHY? Government actors will never really know to what degree their disinformation campaigns are working. Real users can build the communities they desire.

“Colored” relays: Expanding for other non-malign uses.

Such a system could be used to “color” the content within a relay such that the relay serves different content to different groups of users. Maybe some people want moderated content maybe some others don’t. Imagine some users turning on a content filter for explicit language or for content flagged as pornography. Users could login into their account on the relay and update settings on the fly.