Would you mine a public key so you could use an exclusive Nostr relay that only allows ones beginning with 32 leading zero bits (hex) or a BIP-39 word (npub)? This is an experiment to combat spam.

Go wss://pow32.nostr.land

Some people have joined the experiment!

a little homage to @adam3us <3

@cameri Why not just charge sats to get whitelisted, if they spam then terminate their access and keep their sats?

@cameri Why not just require PoW in events?

@cameri Even though i think this is a cleaver workaround, its not a long term solution. As if this becomes yuge people will specialise HW for this.

@cameri No, but I would like to try a relay that accepts payloads without a pubkey (proof of work to verify - relay/clients have to find the key)

@cameri Couldn't you just have a mined hash (leading zeros) in your NIP05 file to prove you have done a certain amount of work for a certain pub key? Some relay could set a minimum amount of work.

@cameri Nash cash

@cameri If users are incentivised with some features only available for mined keys, they might try it and maybe devs even make it easier to mine. Not sure about exclusive relays however less limits for mined keys and extra client features should work.

@cameri I made nostr.rest to mine keys and was wondering about POW in ID like NIP-13 vs POW for addresses, maybe a combination of both would be good but not sure

@cameri No; PoW should be in the event

@cameri I wouldn't want to tie my pub to a NIP defined for a special case relay. I'd rather see the server define a cost per byte per time i.e. to_pow_target(n_bytes*ttl). Might makes sense to do a per relay PoW because storing N*100 bytes isn't equal for N=3 or N=20 (N=num of relays).

@cameri I think it will be necessary to implement PoW restrictions on PubKeys to avoid spamming or complicating the attempt.

@cameri Already did nostr.rocks/0000002855ad79… It was year ago with my own implementation of mining pubkey on one core of CPU 😅 just for fun when I was working on Elixir library for secp256k1 I let it run over night and picked the best one.

@cameri I think centralized entities can only be excluded by requiring in-person key exchange for relay access.

@cameri Relays need a payment incentive, ie pay to post. Sats for the storage of the post, and as ION service. To support free users relays could require a “thumbs up payment” by paid user to ack post as contributing. Payment reduces as more people ack. First ack is refunded.

@cameri I would mine a public key in order to combat spam. Only a desktop CPU here to contribute... but something I could dedicate an hour (or a day) to mine a Nostr PubKey with.

@cameri Is spam an issue yet? What mitigation strategies already exist?