stacksatsio on Nostr: #[0] Follow up. Lightning is the killer app on Nostr. Directly monetising events is ...

quoting nevent1q…w5mq

Re spam solutions I wanted to elaborate on an idea I put out earlier.

**Pay-to-relay (P2R) combined with Reward-for-Reports (R4R).**

P2R’s biggest downside is many people don’t have Bitcoin, and taking fiat payments is painful. But paid Relayers are incentivised to provide good service to fund their infra and that aligns them to Users. Long term I believe this is the way despite limitations (will elaborate later).

Payment is already a disincentive to spammers but a motivated actor could still clear a low threshold and see value in spamming.

And community reporting in the fiat world is shit because it has been weaponised; either you have unpaid unemployed Reddit jannie types who control spaces and make them awful, or the tooling is used to target people with opposing views.

This is where R4R comes in.

I propose a two-sided system where Users who report bad actors are rewarded, and those who abuse reporting are penalised.

Reporters (Users) would be rewarded by the Relayer sharing the P2R payment upon blacklisting of a keypair. Example:

Spammer pays 1000 Sats for whitelisting on a relay and their keypair immediately starts spamming. 5 Users report them inside an hour which triggers automatic blacklisting on the relay. The relay operator keeps 500 Sats and sends 100 each to the 5 Reporters.

Clearly with the financial incentive to report, some bright spark will get trigger happy and over-report to make money.

Well our bright spark has also paid 1000 Sats to the relay operator, abuse of the reporting system will also get you blacklisted in which case the Relayer keeps the whole 1000.

So now there is a potential incentive for the relay operators to blacklist people to keep their money without providing a service.

Sure I concede that.

But if you get banned unfairly you can switch to another P2R and whinge about your ban; if Relayers ban enough Users and get a reputation as a Reddit jannie they will lose customers and fail anyway (Austrian economics for the win).

Relayers will thus be incentivised to not be heavy handed in blacklisting. Setup automated rules for thresholds, consistent enforcement, and just review exceptions.

Relay reputation sites/services will quickly appear. Early on I predict there will be rug pulls, but over time the best operators will gain a reputation (much like lightning node operators) and succeed.

Keen to have the concept challenged and holes pointed out by the community.

Follow up.

Lightning is the killer app on Nostr. Directly monetising events is going to draw people in so onboarding will rapidly improve; building use cases with native internet money will have a flywheel effect of it growing more use cases and further growing the network.

Just look at Wallet of Satoshi’s recent growth for evidence. Now imagine those direct event zaps. Polls where users vote with Sats. Vida type inbound payments on DMs. Nostr Clients will have Lightning wallets baked in within 12 months.

PoW has its place, if anything in combination with P2R as an additional layer of friction where Relay operators are looking to curate a service but Users are accustomed to paying for things, not mining.

The friction with time is different to purely financial friction and in these early stages I think it could work ok with a largely Bitcoin community but it’s less likely for broader adoption and will cap out.

It’s easier for a User to acquire Bitcoin and get Sats in a lightning wallet than it is to understand and execute mining a PoW.