Re spam solutions I wanted to elaborate on an idea I put out earlier.

**Pay-to-relay (P2R) combined with Reward-for-Reports (R4R).**

P2R’s biggest downside is many people don’t have Bitcoin, and taking fiat payments is painful. But paid Relayers are incentivised to provide good service to fund their infra and that aligns them to Users. Long term I believe this is the way despite limitations (will elaborate later).

Payment is already a disincentive to spammers but a motivated actor could still clear a low threshold and see value in spamming.

And community reporting in the fiat world is shit because it has been weaponised; either you have unpaid unemployed Reddit jannie types who control spaces and make them awful, or the tooling is used to target people with opposing views.

This is where R4R comes in.

I propose a two-sided system where Users who report bad actors are rewarded, and those who abuse reporting are penalised.

Reporters (Users) would be rewarded by the Relayer sharing the P2R payment upon blacklisting of a keypair. Example:

Spammer pays 1000 Sats for whitelisting on a relay and their keypair immediately starts spamming. 5 Users report them inside an hour which triggers automatic blacklisting on the relay. The relay operator keeps 500 Sats and sends 100 each to the 5 Reporters.

Clearly with the financial incentive to report, some bright spark will get trigger happy and over-report to make money.

Well our bright spark has also paid 1000 Sats to the relay operator, abuse of the reporting system will also get you blacklisted in which case the Relayer keeps the whole 1000.

So now there is a potential incentive for the relay operators to blacklist people to keep their money without providing a service.

Sure I concede that.

But if you get banned unfairly you can switch to another P2R and whinge about your ban; if Relayers ban enough Users and get a reputation as a Reddit jannie they will lose customers and fail anyway (Austrian economics for the win).

Relayers will thus be incentivised to not be heavy handed in blacklisting. Setup automated rules for thresholds, consistent enforcement, and just review exceptions.

Relay reputation sites/services will quickly appear. Early on I predict there will be rug pulls, but over time the best operators will gain a reputation (much like lightning node operators) and succeed.

Keen to have the concept challenged and holes pointed out by the community.