calle's avatar
calle calle@cashu.me 9 months ago
We've tried rate-limiting Cashu mints with PoW but turns out if you want mobile phones with javascript to compete against DoS servers, the server always wins... I'm convinced now that the only practical use of PoW is Bitcoin and it's better to use sats to slow things down.

Replies (16)

sandwich's avatar
sandwich bread@sandwich.farm 9 months ago
1. Dont use JS for POW, use WASM and load several threads by detecting available cores. 2. Yes, servers/asics will always win when there is financial motive.
Boniz23⚡️🇮🇹₿ 🏴‍☠️'s avatar
Boniz23⚡️🇮🇹₿ 🏴‍☠️ Boniz23@nostrcheck.me 9 months ago
That’s an interesting realization. PoW is great for trustless, decentralized security, but when the competition is asymmetric (mobile vs. server farms), it breaks down. Using sats as a rate limiter makes sense it aligns incentives and adds an economic cost to spam without the computational arms race. Maybe a hybrid approach could work? A small PoW requirement to deter casual spam, plus sats to make large-scale abuse costly.
hoppe2's avatar
hoppe2 6 months ago
Why does a mint need a rate limit? To be more precise, I don't understand the context of a legitimate user 'competing' with a DDoS server. I can understand that there might be attackers who want to attack the mint for reasons other than financial gain, but why does the issue of competition with regular users come up? It's not like this is a system where you get a reward for completing a challenge.
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npub1vadc...nuu7 6 months ago
I came to the same conclusion in the past, e.g. in this conversation:
Gist
SNICKER BIP draft
SNICKER BIP draft. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.
 And agree with the reasoning... without the system having a massive asymmetry in favor of the defender, it's not viable, and *even then*, it may not work (hence I am dubious about Tor's recent efforts). Funnily enough even back then I saw a good solution being .. ecash :) (privacypass etc) but yeah LN sats could also be viable depending on the system.
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