nostr spam problem - free steaks for everyone

nostr was designed with the idea that p2p networks dont work well. that may or may not be the case. p2p networks typically mean that participants have a stake in the game. nostr goes to the another edge: nobody has a stake in the game. it costs nothing to send a message and it costs nothing to preserve it. a peer can send message to 100 participants, 50 probably accept it, and year later the message is still at 30 relays. there is no stake at play.

how p2p networks differ? bittorrent is our example scenario. in bittorrent a torrent basically follows laws of nature. if nobody puts effort for the survival of torrent, it dies. and its a good thing, because if bittorrent was like nostr, there would be so many torrents nobody would be able to find anything relevant anymore. at least if we expect everyone to only search through dht.

design princible of nostr is very novel:

because short notes dont cost much in storage, lets allow everyone to send any amount of them

but in practice this is like putting a tiny diamond in a sandbox. then pouring over 100 cubic meters of sand and telling someone to find the diamond!

everyone got to put their grain of sand in the sandbox! its censorship resistant sandbox. but if all you want is a diamond, all the sand is simply useless.

i think every network needs to have a stake in play for participants. most nostr devs think the stake is in social graph. but this is not necessarily how global connected networks should work.

maybe relays should not really store notes. what if relays were simply a short lived caching layer to hold the content while peer may be offline for some duration.