Users aren’t meant to do proof-of-work… indeed, that is not a viable defense strategy like Adam Back originally intended due to botnets et al.

The ingenious innovation was when Satoshi applied Adam’s proof-of-work spam deflection to miners (servers)… rather than to users sending emails as Adam Back intended.

Satoshi created the first long-lasting user-server model that’s decentralized — problem is it’s very expensive to store data in blocks.

The whole point of nostr that makes it distinct from IPFS is users no longer need to spin up a server to participate — nor do they need to expend tons of computationally power or bandwidth… User costs on nostr should remain low like they are for a bitcoin user’s lightwallet via SPV.