there are many bitcoiners who i’ve talked to who dismiss nostr outright because it doesn’t have pow or fees for spam resistance, as if all decentralized protocols are worthless without that baked into the base layer.

I think it makes sense for a centralized ledger with syncronized state, but i don’t see how that would work for a system with real users. Theres a reason hashcash didn’t take off for email. The UX is terrible. Paying for each message is also terrible to bake into the lowest level of the protocol.

nostr is extremely flexible, thats a good thing, it doesn’t solve all problems at layer1, and thats fine. I prefer flexible over top-down designs that try to anticipate every future attack.