We're missing each other. The difficulty requirement isn't for any event written to that relay, it's public key specific. If a user is spamming, or the public key is new to the relay, the requirements for that user are raised.
Discussion
Well, PoW in Nostr (NIP-13) is per event.
Pubkey PoW also doesn't solve spam. Sure, It's easier for people to send posts from a phone, but if relays change the difficulty, there is no good way for people to migrate their content to a new key. Especially DMs, notifications, zaps etc that require each sender to resign all their past messages to your past key, but now tagging the new key.
Sorry, I'm confused, why would a change in relay difficulty force people to migrate content to a new key?
Computing power gets cheaper over time (specially from these early days). Difficulty adjustments are inevitable.
Yes, but why would old notes need migrating? The relay, at the time of writing, puts up a difficulty requirement, and the note gets written. Raising the difficulty on that pubkey only applies to future notes, it shouldn't require reposting old content to meet the new difficulty target.
But if I want access to the notes in my past key, I need to migrate them to the new key. Otherwise, apps will only show the new content. And if there is something I know about users is that they love their past content.
I'm still confused why we're talking about old and new keys? Are we able to migrate notes from one pubkey to another as though the new key posted it? This is my nth pubkey, I would've liked to know 😂
Yeah, you and your friends just need to resign everything. It's not that hard.
People don't want to lose their data on a key change. So, we need migration. It's a must have. And maybe PubKey PoW relays is what will get them done.
What would a regular note look like, before and after a migration like this? Can you provide a real example? Curious what it looks like, and confused as to why if you're having to recreate a note as though the new key posted it, why providing a new POW value is not an option at the same time. The pubkey, sig, id, etc all change anyway?
With this tool, you can offer PoW pubkeys. But we don't have the migration tool yet and you can't assume we will have until somebody makes it.
Right now, PoW keys are just a cosmetic benefit.