so basically my idea except the relay gets the sats?
I run my own relay so I still get the sats.
That's acceptable too. Anything that cost a tiny bit of money is a massive deterrent against spammers and scammers.
but it would be cool if we could close the conversation. requiring someone to repay the sats if they want to DM again. đđ
That won't block spam though. Our experience is that spammers have way more money than regular people to pay for such things.
It will block 98% of spammers. I set a price of 0.10 cents of my forum using BTCPay server simply to register and it basically killed 100% of spam.
What experience exactly? I do not know of any service where they have implemented my idea. Where it cost money to do something.
Almost everything is free these days so it's quite cheap for spammers and scammers to function.
I'm sure some spam will get through but pretty much no spam. The sats should be split between the relays and receiver of the DM because if you're making money the spam won't be so annoying and it helps us see how much spam is still getting through. I don't want the rekay hiding the sats from us.
Yeah, lots of people tried. I remember 4 or 5 startups that had payments to send messages. This is an old idea. All of them failed because instead of killing spam, they also killed all the legitimate people that wanted to send you a message. In the end, nobody received anything.
On Nostr, we have seem lots of Zapvertizing. When people send you zaps to display a notificaition with they brand image or promotion. Lots of companies do this right now. Some people see more zapvertizers than normal notifications.
The point is that Spam only exists because it is profitable for the sender. And that profit margin is large enough that they can send you some sats to get the message through.
That's because the old startups were running on the fiat system. Payments donât work well on the fiat system, and fiat people also run on a mindset that they donât want to pay for anything. So yes, it wonât work if your customer base is fiat people.
But on the Bitcoin system, itâs different. Bitcoiners are more willing to pay for things because we already have access to money without going through a bank, and most importantly, we have micro-payments. You simply canât do micro-payments in the fiat system unless you implement some âexchange your money for creditsâ setup.
Zapvertizing works well. I get some of those maybe once every two weeks, and it works, I always check the profile of who sent it to me. It doesnât bother me because most of the companies are legit and genuinely trying to advertise their brand. The only spammers I see are the ones abusing the like button, which is free which is why I have been pushing for pay sats to follow someone/interact with the profile as well.
Spam doesnât just exist because itâs profitable, it also exists because itâs free or cheap enough to spray at scale. If you raise the cost per attempt, even slightly, you cut out the majority of low-effort spammers instantly.
Sure, there will always be some determined actors with enough margin to pay a few sats, but Bitcoin allows you to tune that cost dynamically. If you set the price just high enough to make spamming unprofitable, you filter out the noise while still letting genuine people through.
On the fiat system you canât fine-tune like that, transactions are too big, slow, and costly. On the Bitcoin system you can make it cost fractions of a cent, and that tiny friction is often enough to kill mass-blast spam.
Thatâs why a pay-to-message system on Nostr and everywhere could work where fiat failed.
