i'm quite surprised to discover that nobody has actually really made much note on the interwebs about why they don't use hashcash or bitmessage anymore
it's quite odd, you search for them and all the information just vanishes after a certain point, bitmessage was clearly not used after 2017 and hashcash was gone by 2003
yet here we are on #nostr with kids trying to use #PoW to stop spam, and it clearly was a spectacular failure on both previous attempts to use it for message spam prevention
Thank you for giving a couple of examples. Can you elaborate a theory of why they failed? Or is it just "several attempts have been made and they failed." It's one thing to notice "the socialist experiments almost always lead to death and destruction" but another to explain the calculation problem. You sound certain that PoW cannot work as spam deterrence under any circumstances and I, for one, am open to that idea. But so far your explanations have been scattered and disjoint.
jesus ....
because of game theory!
i've written about this extensively in the last weeks as i see more and more idiots talk about how they are gonna stop spam on their proposed nostr based apps and nobody is paying any attention
"hashpower mobility" is a key phrase to understand
another one is "if the thing is worth something, and spam can win it, there will be spam to win the thing"
So that's a partial answer, and my apologies if I haven't gone and found all your posts about it, but "if spamming costs more than the thing that spamming can win" is still there, right? The spam must be profitable or it will cease after the losses are realized. The argument cannot be "it is impossible to imagine a world where it is prohibitively expensive to do the wrong thing and relatively cheap to do the right thing" but something to do with the details in constructing such a world. Hashpower mobility, I assume, means that hashpower tends to get directed to its most profitable use and relatively quickly. I also assume that spam requires a cheap way to send many messages such that only a small fraction bear fruit in a big way, thereby covering the cost of the sending.
It sounds like your point (and I'm guessing again because I cannot read your mind) is that in order to cause the cheap hashpower available to spammers to be unprofitable, the imposition of PoW would make doing the right thing too expensive? That there is an imbalance between what hashpower is available cheaply for spammers versus hashpower available to the common Joe on a common consumer device?
yes, the spammer is going to steal and scale their hashpower much faster than the casual user, if it works out to be a net profit
and note that "net profit" doesn't necessarily mean actual money it can be the sick pleasure of fucking with people, griefing, etc
think of the number of psycho trickster scammer bastard hackers out there who have resources to burn on this sort of thing - they'll hire cloud compute just to fuck with people, because their money isn't real anyway, it is stolen
a more structured system that is based on payments and provably fair random number generation is more likely to stay feasible for users
