Interesting. I will search and read about that.
But I don't think you can wait 10 minutes of intensive computing on a smartphone to just send a message - it would make nostr unusable, and onboarding almost impossible.
Login to reply
Replies (2)
I feel like the onboarding success rate would be higher than it is for paid relays or relays clogged with spam
So I now understand that Tor nodes can enable PoW as a defense mechanism against DDoS attacks, as described in
The goal is to mitigate connection-level flooding, such as when a botnet with thousands of compromised machines overwhelms onion services by initiating millions of introduction requests.
This is fundamentally a DDoS prevention mechanism, not an anti-spam strategy.
In contrast, if (or when?) Nostr relays are flooded with millions of spammy notes per second, one might consider applying a similar PoW-based throttle—e.g., requiring a 20-bit PoW, which takes about one second to compute. This would theoretically reduce the spam rate to thousands of notes per second per spammer node.
Would this actually be effective as an anti-spam?
GitLab
proposals/327-pow-over-intro.txt · main · The Tor Project / Core / Tor Specifications · GitLab
Tor Specifications and Proposals