Ok, so here is a draft NIP for a Proof of Work Service Provider. All Feedback welcome!
Would love to hear from relay operators, open source relay contributors, client apps, Nostr users.
Basically, it allows for you to generate an event POW before signing as part of a relay membership or pre-paid credit system. Ultimately to succeed, Nostr apps would need to offer it.
I have a fully functional rust implementation I’ll likely open source (if enough interest), that just needs the payment integration code - and a bunch of testing.
https://gist.github.com/blakejakopovic/6c0ea718c0f956c461e9e8952d8c6533
This might interest you.
It’s looking like the proof of work minimum required to combat spam is likely around 20. That’s really high for mobiles and even laptops.
Therefore, we need to offload that computation somewhere - like a service provider.
I aim to release initial code this week. It’s missing payments and remote POW generation (if you want to use a different server).
#[2]
20 what? seconds? leading zeros?
Leading zero bits (which is different from leading zeros, for clarity).
Spam will be coming from servers. The reasonable compute for a server to generate POW is where the minimum gets set.. client devices just need to match it.
Dynamic POW requirements based on content or publishers are also possible.
We won’t know a real number until it’s used in the wild. It depends on how much spammers / advertisers are willing to pay extra to get their events accepted.
