Bitchat needs Nostr's WebOfTrust. It's the only solution against spam.
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Replies (44)
@calle to build a good WoT, you will need to use the existing outbox model to find the trust drivers of the network, regardless of how you define what "trust" means for bitchat users.
How would ephemeral identities have a Web of Trust?
Por que não PoW?
Doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of Bitchat's privacy?
That's the point. You can't use ephemeral identities.
I think client side heuristic spam filters would go a long way. Also just a working block command is necessary
There is no privacy on bitchat.
We have been down this road on nostr. Its not enough.
Or just keep it to bluetooth. That was the whole idea. Or so I thought.
I don't think that's what we're building. We want to talk to everyone in a location and people you don t know. There is no concept of following. You're thinking about a Twitter clone with feeds and follows etc.
Let's play it through: How would it work in your mind? You travel to SF and you want to know what's up on SF. You have 0 friends in SF.
Vice versa, you're in Tokyo. You want to ask all your neighbors where the best events are today. You don't know who's loving around you.
wot doesn't work if you want to talk to the world
WoT, PoW or ecash stamps, innit?
There's privacy at the app layer (nostr identity)
There's no privacy at the connectivity layer (IP address)
Bare minimum is bitchat supporting relays need to demand pow on events then
pow?
the world can read with WoT they just can't write *to your relay* reading is separate
WoT doesn't change any of those goals. It would just filter out all of the spam out to just people that have follows in the rest of nostr.
We went down this road with Around me and many public chat specs in nostr. Only wot can save you from the spam.
Pow doesn't work. Spammers have more pow than any user.
Not even. They just use random keys. That's not privacy. That's annonimity. You can still track the keys.
Track the keys with the IP, you mean?
Refundable cashu deposit then :)
Or with just reuse, nickname matching, timestamp mapping.. there are so many ways to deannonimize things
Sure, but does it not help at all? What's wrong with having multiple layers of spam blocking? It doesn't have to be effective, just not useless. Even removing 30% of the worst spam is better than not. And this is much more relevant to bitchat than amethyst.
Spammers are scripts running on desktops, sometimes with GPUs, wired to a power outlet. There is no way battery-based systems can beat them. All you are going to do is to waste people's batteries. We implemented pow on amethyst, but it was clearly draining way faster than what we though it would.
I have been playing with Bitchat since launch and have yet to find a use case other than as an in-house intercom.
Shouting is more effective.
But metadata (nickname, timestamp, etc) in a public chat is precisely public, not private.
🙄
Isn't Bitchat E2EE?
Not this nostr ephemeral event part.
Web of trust is silly & abusive It's not a solution but problematic.
Everyone on nostr is using some version of WoT. Your All Follows feed is by definition a WebOfTrust filter.
I see nostr clients that don't use wot at all. I see the wot as a way to gate people to only look at popular profiles of only people who fit the suit size. It's not a solution when people report over petty reasons or even go out of their way to abuse it. 1 npub can spam every report reason & each one is it's own seperate report affecting this wot. People make bots that do abusive stuff like spam news & mass reports. Something better needs to be created.
Looks like you are misunderstanding what WoT is. It simply means that people you follow have priority over others because you choose to follow them. If you don't follow spammers, you won't see spam in a WoT system.
1. That's not what WoT means, that's a shitty basic "follow" based implementation
2. If any WoT implementation can filter spam correctly, it would need to actually be good, not how you just described
Sure, that's our goal.
So have people mine the PoW tokens on wall power to use later on battery.
How many times do I have to re-explain basic concepts like PoW as a random guy who can't code, in discussions with top nostr devs?
That's not true I see tons of spam because it's all new bots making news npubs & rss feeds. They don't popup because of someone I followed but I see them now more then ever due to this relay change you did centralizing them.
I'd start with removing "follows" from the app then but let's see if someday AI learns to code so I can just make my own good app regardless of how yours is
Where do you see them? Your main feed only shows your follows. Or are you on Global? If so, you are supposed to see them. That's what Global is.
We are building a per relay global for those that want to see a specific relay.
Global of course wot is for global.
Global should never have any filter. People want to see the spam as well, so they can block them or take other actions against them.
Sorry but I don't understand how. If you could explain it in a bit more detail or addressed the issues that I've noted I might. appreciate you.
Cashu is just tokenized pow (sats).
It's easy to track who is active where and when, between Nostr and BitChat and figure out who might be who. There are AIs who are designed to crunch that data.
Anon publishing is only effective, if you use it sparingly and rarely, so that you don't leave a data trail.
As a user, I don't want to see messages from brand new Nostr accounts. I want to see messages from people that have had Nostr for a while or that I have chatted before, regardless if I am following them directly or not.
Each spammer can easily connect to all relays around the globe at the same time and can reply as if they were a local person. Bitchat Bluetooth requires presence, the public ephemeral chat doesn't.
You will have to figure out which users are real and which ones are not without having to make them pay for it. Because otherwise, US spammers can pay much more than Indonesian users. Spammers will always win.
WoT is built over time and because it is based on my follows, my follows' follow and follows follow' follows, it's extremely hard for spammers to get in. These were users I built a relationship with even though I don't follow them directly. They spent time to gather my likes, reactions, replies.
That's the real proof of work. Money cannot just buy it. Spammers can make a billion users and make them reply to each other as many times as they want, my WoT is still unaffected. They don't have a way to get in.