Pump it up

Now, when will #[2] ?

It's only Tuesday? Wtf lol. It's been a long week already..

Ah, shit, it's popping off in here. #FridayNightNostr

I would say, for all practical purposes, parents are the best steward of the interests of their children. Especially very young children cannot hope to succeed at making their own decisions about anything.

20 what? seconds? leading zeros?

Thanks!

At some point, if someone is willing to pay enough (sats or work) for it, it's not spam.

The NIPS 13 is already marked 'optional', so even the original idea wasn't forced. I am not even suggesting that, exactly.

I feel like 'Paid Only' Relays create a Nostr country club experience, keeping real people out just as well as spam. They're not a solution to spam that is acceptable, in my opinion, dividing the community and putting up a wall for new users. The alternative is to require the relay operators do this continuous effort to block spam or throw mountains of resources at the relay, making it a full time job to keep a public relay running. Like the blocksize, this determines how decentralized this system can be in reality.

I'd like to combat spam without requiring a relay or client admin to make decisions about what is spam on my behalf. Public Open relays can't accomplish that, they have to make some spam moderation decisions, but public relays that require work or payment may be able to do that, and still be open to all (legitimate normal people, who do some work to prove it or who pay).

I certainly don't want to impose anything on anyone.

My post is merely an open letter to draw attention to the fact that this NIPS is getting stale and it is something I believe is needed, though I could be wrong, I would like to try it out.

Email could add work to stop the spam in that decentralized system, but at this point there's too many different implementations and too many applications to even hope to get anywhere in adding it.

At some point a protocol hardens. In email this means that the spam blockers, the Outlook, the Google, etc. They dominate the system by way of the impossibility of a little guy keeping his email server up and performant and free of spam. I'd like Nostr to be little guy friendly. Let's not be email.

Perhaps the relays could be, each one, a line in the hashed message and so long as the hashed message included a line of text provided by the relay, it can confirm the user did unique work, without requiring the user to hash each message independently. A single message could be hashed and used as verification but still only once for each relay that provided, each, a line of text to hash.

I'm not sure how to do it without permitting the work to be re-used, but I'd love to see something like this. I can imagine a client showing you a progress bar as your work builds up, letting you know you can do another like or post.

Perhaps the relays would be queried for a string to hash. I think a big part of what is missing is how do clients figure out how much work they need to do? There's no part of the NIPS that defines this. I suppose the idea is that users would filter for work, but I don't think they will. The NIPS should be updated to presume the relays are filtering for work and so they need to provide a target and they could provide the message to hash.

The relays would each require unique work from you, to post, but you could build up that work while you're just browsing, and that would be pretty cool.

Yeah, we should, at the protocol, provide a mechanism for spam moderation such that we don't need relays to do moderation just to keep from being DDoS.

Users should be empowered and spam prevention is really fundamental, but we don't want to divide communities or trust other agents to decide what is spam. That invisibly permits content moderation right beside spam moderation.

I still don't know that we'd ever be able to prevent content moderation, but enabling smaller niche hobbyist relays to exist and function well, without being DDoS or costing so much in resources, is a big step towards ensuring that it really doesn't matter if some relays moderate content too much, if you have client support for work. I would assume that the easier it is to run a relay the more relays are likely to exist that will accept your speech.

#[9]

https://blog.lopp.net/protect-contact-forms-from-spam-with-proof-of-work/

Botnets are also an opportunity cost. A user playing on a social media app is not considering what else they'd do with their CPU work, at that moment. A botnet, of which there are really only a few, do have other uses and potential monetization. We don't need users to do more work than an botnet, just make it cost enough more that it's more profitable to do something else with it.

Paid relays are the mobile solution, certainly, with or without additional work. However, allowing work as the alternative to paying prevents the walled garden result. Non-paying users can still be in the community, and if the required work is correctly tuned, without the spam of an open public relay.

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/13.md

#[0]

#[1]

#[2] #[3] #[4]

There seems to be some dismissal of PoW as a part of Nostr resisting spam which is very disruptive to the ability for hobbyist users to run relays or for users to enjoy an experience using Nostr to meet people. I'm quite disappointed that PoW has basically been ignored even as one of the earlier NIPS proposed.

Paid-Only relays create walled gardens which harms the user experience. We need to maintain an open global protocol and spam is still a problem if we don't wall ourselves off in paid and divided gardens. It seems to be that we're hoping public relay operators and clients are going to implement filtering that is invisible to users and done by policy that is undeclared, taking on the same role of the institutions we're fleeing from, Twitter and Facebook, etc.

Proof of Work is not about who has the resources. Spammers do have plenty of resources, the important bit is cost to rewards. Bot nets have an economic value., and other means of monetization and all Proof of Work has to do is ensure that a bot net is better used doing something else. Users don't have to outcompete a bot net, they just have to make it cost more than it could earn doing something else.

Please keep Nostr open and free and implement PoW at the relays and the clients.

Thanks

The major question is how to adapt a mobile client to it. Phones and batteries aren't currently going to support enough work to do it like that. Phone users will have to buy work, which is basically the same as 'paid' relays.

I think #[4] 's focus on paid relays is due to his focus on the phone app.

That's patently false. Spammers are doing 100x, 1000x more than a normal user activity requires.