Nostr Web Client

Hey, I appreciate the discussion here.

So, the fallacy of your perspective on proof-of-work is that you think simply because someone has more hashpower than you, they will use it against you regardless of the cost/benefit. This is unlikely.

The highest cost/benefit application of proof-of-work is mining bitcoin. There is an real opportunity cost to use hashpower for spam instead of for mining bitcoin.

You are arguing that the cost to spam should remain zero because if we raise the cost, someone will automatically be willing to pay to continue to spam and this will only harm legitimate users. That's not how markets work. If you raise the cost to spam from 0 to 1, you will get less spam. It doesn't matter how much potential hashpower someone has. What matters is the opportunity cost of using that hashpower to spam rather than earn bitcoin.

Additionally, you can sum the cost of the proof of work per real user and it is provably trivial. Like I said, 30 units of POW takes about the same time as loading a webpage. Trivial if you post even a dozen notes per day.

But non-trivial if you spam 50,000 notes per day, because now you must generate 1.5 million units of proof of work daily to do what you used to do for free. This is non-trivial and will incur real costs to the spammer.

[NPC] Tony 2y ago

Same here, I think it's very difficult to have productive exchange over wire. Much apprenticed.

I don't think there is a fallacy in my perspective but I agree that it is unlikely that hashpower will be used in disregard to cost/benefit.

To mine bitcoin you need bring a competitive amount of hashpower for it to be worth the cost. If PoW was as widespread on nostr as on bitcoin your words must carry enough value or be part of a sponsored/collective agenda in order to be mined. I think NIP-13 paves the way for a new actor to emerge in the network, namely the "publisher" a.k.a middle man.

This happened when the press was invented, and book production became cheap. The results were consorship, discrimination, regulation and centralization. please bear with me.

The price of spamming today is not 0.

Spammer pays electricity/bandwidth but relays shoulders the bulk of the costs, as a user i'm not that bothered by spam (yet).

The majority of genuine users are always going to use the cheapest mass produced lowpower hardware. Spammers with an incentive to advertise are always going to use beefy desktops or botnets.

No spam is ever produced by battery powered mobile phones, which will be the first device class to starve if we set their food on fire.

I agree that 30 units of PoW today, while nostr is a tiny underground network - makes a lot of sense. But PoW is a force of nature that once ignited, cannot be extinguished, Bitcoin is living proof of that..

- NIP-13 is maliciously anti-plebian but most likely accidental/incompetence.

- PoW does not scale, prices do.

I still vote on adding more personal-relays to distribute the network load/increase capacity.

But I know that path is a magnitude more difficult.

*sigh* I have an anti-spam PoW suggestion, that I never received feedback for.

Please speak your mind, I will listen.

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Discussion

arkinox 2y ago

What's your anti spam proposal?

[NPC] Tony 2y ago

Don't PoW the post-id, PoW the public key with something meaningful other than zeroprefix.

arkinox 2y ago

Sounds like https://github.com/telamon/powmem

[NPC] Tony 2y ago

Yup, totally busted.

I had a little bit too much fun developing that demo...

It's been a few months since it was published so in hindsight I would remove the age/gender and propose to fight spam by:

- PoW encode geohash into public key (like vanity address)

- spam notes are generated by spam accounts. So Incurr one time cost on account generation.

- given relays that only accept authors from a bounded geo-area, spammers would have to pay more to nuke a specific location or city.

I thought this was a lot more client friendly than NIP-13, and also help decentralize all actors in the network.

I thought it was a good idea, and kinda still do.

But the people I showed it to just went silent, 0-feedback 😥😕

Honest opinion please? 😐

arkinox 2y ago

Wow that was you? Really cool ideas here!

So I guess I didn't grasp that you envisioned relays operating based on the geohash. I'm probably getting this wrong, but: you envision relays only accepting notes from a specific geohash region? So to post to a place you must POW your identity? But then your identity is restricted to posting in that place?

QW 2y ago

Great discussion.

[NPC] Tony 2y ago

nostr:npub1arkn0xxxll4llgy9qxkrncn3vc4l69s0dz8ef3zadykcwe7ax3dqrrh43w Yup that was me, and yes i should have clarified that it gives relays the option to filter notes by quick binary-xor-distance.

I envision relays to know their own geolocation, and accept posts based on a radius variable. Infinite radius you accept global posts and global spam. (Current relays)

System overload? Lower the radius a couple of bits.

Want more content? radius +2bits.

The vision was pulsating georelays with variably auto-adjusted signal strength.

As a user, yeah your post will have to be boosted by foreign users when global-relays are under heavy load. Otherwise you're stuck in geofence >paidrelays>nip13. Account blocked? Game over, restart.

I had the idea while i was flying around in some cyberspace simulator that visualized nostr Posts in 3d. Hang on, I bookmarked it somewhere.

arkinox 2y ago

Lol dude, you mean onosendai.tech? I made that 😆 I can't believe my app gave you that idea, that's amazing 😂

That's a really cool idea with the geo relays. Obviously it's hard to get relays to switch but it can happen as the need to mitigate spam increases.

[NPC] Tony 2y ago

Wait what???

Dude! 😳 holy sheit, yes!

I saw random clusters forming and imagined they were different countries, visited a few but the posts weren't sorted/related, so I thought it would've been cool if it was heuristic ASL, see what content people in different age ranges enjoyed, maybe detect missing target audiences in some locations to help onboard/fill the void. Or open up relay shop.

I guess the worldmap is a kind 2D interpretation of onosendai:

https://telamon.github.io/powmem/demo.html

So uh, Is nostr stuck with nip13 or is there still hope?

arkinox 2y ago

There is definitely hope.

Construct mining in cyberspace uses a modified "close-enough" form of POW. I think as the need arises, many different kinds of POW can be used. Nothing about cyberspace is in a NIP yet. It doesn't need to be as far as I'm concerned, except maybe kind reservations. NIPs are possibilities, not rules.

I think you and I should collaborate 🤝

arkinox 2y ago

See https://github.com/arkin0x/cyberspace if you haven't already

tforbanan 2y ago

Why don't you write a nip?

ภ๏รtг๏ภคยt 2y ago

Was wondering what geohashes could be used for....

arkinox 2y ago

You can certainly invent other validation schemes for proof-of-work. Event ID is only one way of doing it