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⚡A C V⚡ 2y ago

#[0]

#[1]

#[2] #[3] #[4]

There seems to be some dismissal of PoW as a part of Nostr resisting spam which is very disruptive to the ability for hobbyist users to run relays or for users to enjoy an experience using Nostr to meet people. I'm quite disappointed that PoW has basically been ignored even as one of the earlier NIPS proposed.

Paid-Only relays create walled gardens which harms the user experience. We need to maintain an open global protocol and spam is still a problem if we don't wall ourselves off in paid and divided gardens. It seems to be that we're hoping public relay operators and clients are going to implement filtering that is invisible to users and done by policy that is undeclared, taking on the same role of the institutions we're fleeing from, Twitter and Facebook, etc.

Proof of Work is not about who has the resources. Spammers do have plenty of resources, the important bit is cost to rewards. Bot nets have an economic value., and other means of monetization and all Proof of Work has to do is ensure that a bot net is better used doing something else. Users don't have to outcompete a bot net, they just have to make it cost more than it could earn doing something else.

Please keep Nostr open and free and implement PoW at the relays and the clients.

Thanks

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Discussion

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jb55 2y ago

How do you expect mobile users to utilize PoW? If the answer is Delegated PoW, even that involves payment.

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lucash.dev 2y ago

That involves payment. But the PoW can still be verified.

You can’t verify payment between third parties.

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⚡A C V⚡ 2y ago

Paid relays are the mobile solution, certainly, with or without additional work. However, allowing work as the alternative to paying prevents the walled garden result. Non-paying users can still be in the community, and if the required work is correctly tuned, without the spam of an open public relay.

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lucash.dev 2y ago

Precisely. Anyone can still get a laptop or other thing better than a phone and do the PoW.

And they could pay someone else to the work for them when in mobile.

Of course paid relay operators aren’t going to like it as it would make their margins even thinner. But users should have the last word

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Josua Schmid 2y ago

Is there a real world application example of just a bit of PoW? I could spare 500ms of Mobile GPU, but maybe a Botnet could not?

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Josua Schmid 2y ago

I‘m spending a lot of time typing (I‘m a very slow typer). Could we utilize that with some sort of a multiPoW?

Theoretically we could hash each substring of the content with a little bit of Mobile GPU PoW while it‘s in the writing. The slower you write, the more PoW behind your message.

I imagine the nonce being a tree structure, so that you also can edit your text.

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⚡A C V⚡ 2y ago

I'm not sure how to do it without permitting the work to be re-used, but I'd love to see something like this. I can imagine a client showing you a progress bar as your work builds up, letting you know you can do another like or post.

Perhaps the relays would be queried for a string to hash. I think a big part of what is missing is how do clients figure out how much work they need to do? There's no part of the NIPS that defines this. I suppose the idea is that users would filter for work, but I don't think they will. The NIPS should be updated to presume the relays are filtering for work and so they need to provide a target and they could provide the message to hash.

The relays would each require unique work from you, to post, but you could build up that work while you're just browsing, and that would be pretty cool.

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⚡A C V⚡ 2y ago

Perhaps the relays could be, each one, a line in the hashed message and so long as the hashed message included a line of text provided by the relay, it can confirm the user did unique work, without requiring the user to hash each message independently. A single message could be hashed and used as verification but still only once for each relay that provided, each, a line of text to hash.

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Josua Schmid 2y ago

Doesn‘t this go a bit against thin relays?

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⚡A C V⚡ 2y ago

There's far more messages than users and each user would only be working on one hash for each relay at a time, so I think it's within the same order of magnitude of storage space required as running a relay and storing a constant 1 additional bit of text for each user.

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captain ☦️ 2y ago

💯

#[0]

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lucash.dev 2y ago

Been saying that for a while.

The problem isn’t just that people have to pay — but that proof of payment means nothing.

Choosing to display only messages to paid relays means giving these relays all the power to choose what you see.

Adding PoW wouldn’t magically solve it either (though would make it much better).

Unless you used a proper commitment structure to detect missing PoW, it would still allow for censorship— but at least you would only have trust that all the relays you’re connected to aren’t censoring.

With “just paid relays” you also have to trust the relays not to spam you.

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lucash.dev 2y ago

The way Nostr works right now, relays are 100% trusted third-parties.

Most clients don’t even check signatures.

So probably using PoW isn’t very high priority right now

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someone 2y ago

me and #[2] are playing with it..

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fiatjaf 2y ago

The point of Nostr is that different people will make different choices for how to filter things and where to connect to. You want to impose your view on everybody. Instead, you should be supporting initiatives that give the user more control while still keeping everything interoperable and open. That will create an environment in which your desired solution has more chance of being fulfilled.

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lucash.dev 2y ago

Saying he’s trying to impose his views on everybody is absurd.

How exactly is he imposing anything?

By voicing his opinions asking politely for people to consider it?

It’s you who are telling others what they should do.

And even that isn’t forcing anyone — just giving your opinion.

I think everyone can do whatever they want and work on projects that do whatever they like, and give whatever opinions they want about what others are doing.

None of that constitutes imposing anything on others.

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⚡A C V⚡ 2y ago

I certainly don't want to impose anything on anyone.

My post is merely an open letter to draw attention to the fact that this NIPS is getting stale and it is something I believe is needed, though I could be wrong, I would like to try it out.

Email could add work to stop the spam in that decentralized system, but at this point there's too many different implementations and too many applications to even hope to get anywhere in adding it.

At some point a protocol hardens. In email this means that the spam blockers, the Outlook, the Google, etc. They dominate the system by way of the impossibility of a little guy keeping his email server up and performant and free of spam. I'd like Nostr to be little guy friendly. Let's not be email.

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fiatjaf 2y ago

You want to create a hard dependency on POW for the entirety of Nostr, ensuring that all clients and relays implement POW requirements?

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Thomas Rossi 2y ago

some clients and relays can implement an hashing task, but I’m not sure it will make any difference: as soon as the spam is profitable the profiteer can invest in hardware way faster than the average user. So basically it will “rate limit” only humans

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⚡A C V⚡ 2y ago

At some point, if someone is willing to pay enough (sats or work) for it, it's not spam.

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Thomas Rossi 2y ago

Yea but at that point I prefer the bot pays sats to me directly to read the advertisement.

Personal block lists and pay per read.. something like that makes sense to me.

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techjunkie 2y ago

OP uses a lot of words but its unclear wtf he wants to do.

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⚡A C V⚡ 2y ago

The NIPS 13 is already marked 'optional', so even the original idea wasn't forced. I am not even suggesting that, exactly.

I feel like 'Paid Only' Relays create a Nostr country club experience, keeping real people out just as well as spam. They're not a solution to spam that is acceptable, in my opinion, dividing the community and putting up a wall for new users. The alternative is to require the relay operators do this continuous effort to block spam or throw mountains of resources at the relay, making it a full time job to keep a public relay running. Like the blocksize, this determines how decentralized this system can be in reality.

I'd like to combat spam without requiring a relay or client admin to make decisions about what is spam on my behalf. Public Open relays can't accomplish that, they have to make some spam moderation decisions, but public relays that require work or payment may be able to do that, and still be open to all (legitimate normal people, who do some work to prove it or who pay).

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santiago 2y ago

Exactly the way political parties should work in democracy - as gatekeepers of a common ideological ground.

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s3x_jay 2y ago

To that point… I started a issue on GitHub about how Nostr handles sensitive content (#315) but since my account was new and talking about porn my account was flagged and it’s been a week and they still haven’t reviewed my request for reinstatement. Do you have any contacts at GitHub who could get me unflagged? Handling sensitive content properly goes to what you’re saying about giving users the controls they need to have a feed that suits them. (My GitHub account is s3x-jay.)

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utxo the webmaster 🧑‍💻 2y ago

There's no reason why there can't be clients that only interact with proof of work notes, some clients already implement proof of work (gossip)

If you want it then build it!

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HoloKat 2y ago

What does that mean?