It would make normal profile updates very expensive. Why timestamps over PoW? If you prefer older profiles, the dishonest one quickly gains the advantage and never loses it
Discussion
You mean expensive as in you lose the build up age of the previous kind0 event?
Also that you're relying on OpenTimestamps. It theoretically scales well, but if it's a vital link in a trust chain people will spam it either for value or for DoSing honest updates. It's simpler to attach PoW to kind:0 updates, that way the attacker bears the cost
It would be interesting to have a "PoW zap". You can game Bitcoin zaps by zapping yourself, but Proof of Work costs the same either way.
If clients periodically PoW zapped the accounts they follow, legitimate accounts would accumulate huge sums over time, and spammers would always start very low.
On a cell phone? No problem! Someone could run a PoW zapping server that converts Bitcoin into PoW with server efficiency
By the time a scammer has accumulated significant proof (likely on their own), they'll be identified as a known scammer
Sorry, i dont follow....at all.
What do you mean by 'spam it either for value or for DoSing honest updates'.
Also its funny to me you talk about PoW because any PoW idea is absolute shit
Either they'll flood it with honest requests, or they'll flood it to prevent honest updates.
I'll let Satoshi know about PoW. He'll be disappointed, but you're probably right
You realize that a simple OTS gives you Bitcoins PoW practically for free?
And denial of service on a calender server? Meh..it does not even do anything if you simply delay publishing your event until after the timestamp of that event has been mined; at which point you would have to conspire with the calender server.
And if there seriously would be a scenario where that would be a plausible risk because we are dealing with something that high profile, you could just timestamp things with your own bitcoin transaction, and that would still be cheaper (and way way way more definitive of a defensive measure) than going a PoW route.
If your goal is knowing when something was published, OTS certainly gives you that. An attacker will duplicate the update, and also register it with OTS. The next time you update your profile, the attacker is more authoritative than you. OTS gives you "the PoW of the blockchain", but only for knowing a time something happened before.
Collective PoW gives you something else: an expensive notion of how much the network trusts your npub
Yeah i don't think the OTS in this instance is all that helpfull either, especially because older kind0 events are not stored by default.
When it comes to this stuff i am a WoT maxi, i don't really think it is worth doing much else. I have a scheme in mind that could streamline the entire thing, but need to sit down to work the explanation out more at some point.
That seems complex. Proof of Work is less complex, but no one's using that either, so 🤷🏻♂️ Maybe it's a problem that isn't really a problem. If someone who I'm not following messages me, I just ignore it
Bit rude perhaps not to clarify, since you are still a PoW believer:
PoW gives you no defensive advantage whatshowever. This is why it is usefull in Bitcoin, because no participant should have any structural advantage; but when it comes to protecting my stuff, i do want asymmetry, and as much of it that i can possibly get.
The best example of asymmetrical defensive advantage: cryptographic keypairs.
Hope this helps
Not sure what mechanism you're proposing. Something like "PoW zaps" would be an extension of WoT, but with more skin in the game. Your asymmetry is having followers that burn resources. Much harder to Sybil than nostr today