If it was set high enough .. but the pow path always seemed like it would lead to someone having to purchase pow 'credits' to do their first post or etc (vs. wait hours or a day) .. which just leads us back to why not just use lightning imho.
Discussion
I wouldn’t mind a 1 sat per note origination, replies, and quoted notes. Renote (not quoted) and likes should be free.
It’d be cool if all the sats went to nostr:npub10pensatlcfwktnvjjw2dtem38n6rvw8g6fv73h84cuacxn4c28eqyfn34f' developer fund.
with PoW bots arent totally stopped, just reduced. imagine a PoW of 5 seconds, for users thats fine. to post 1 bot post requires 5 seconds, fine. 100 bot posts require 5s*100 or 500 seconds (8.3 mins), 1000 bot posts require 5000 seconds (83.3 mins). you could reduce the bots by requiring longer PoW but you run up against the barrier of users not wishing to wait long enough for the work to complete. 30 seconds of PoW per post for example would be far too high. its a balancing act. 5 seconds may actually be enough.
The problem I see is that bots are usually faster to solve POW (multi-cpu, 24x7 operation) vs a small ARM mobile phone. Even if it was on par as in your example, the bot messages would still overwhelm normal user posts..
a bot will spam as fast as it can, for as long as it can. If it wanted to it could pre-calculate post dated messages in one huge batch and then send them out even faster.. things like that, just seems like it would hurt normal users, but not the bots.
I think the right idea too for nostr, is do the pow once per key. The most annoying of bots create a new key Everytime to bypass any restrictions or mute lists.. doing it per key would give normal users a leg up because they don't have a need for thousands of keys..
I still think lightning is a good measure of pow, because it's more instantaneous, most users would prefer not to wait around and are only on mobile.. (and when you think about it this is what Bitcoin is, it's pow, so in theory humans have it and bots will struggle to have it because spending it ruins their usual game of high volume per mark)
I could see supporting pow for those that don't want to do lightning, but they would need to spend a good 3 hours or so, maybe even a day, on a pow key during their onboarding.. which would still be easier to game for a bot, that could be sitting on many keys to deploy at once in a spam campaign.