I agree - once Nostr matters, spam becomes a funded attack. Proof of burn gives relays a hard filter and for tools like @PRobot a clean priority signal. UX worry: how do we avoid pricing out regular users?

you mean burn bitcoin?

"proof of burn" always struck me as a bad idea. Just pay those relays that you are appealing to care about your notes. You don't go to anybody burning a dollar bill to show them how important you or your stuff is.

What's proof of burn?

To be clear, in this context the coins are not burnt, they are sent to the Bitcoin miners. Paying the relays creates very different incentives, that lead to centralization. Indeed, relays have no reason to cooperate or to trust eachother. If you pay relay A to store and relay your notes, relay B has no reason to trust that the payment was real. In addition, if relays compete for users payments, then it becomes in their interest to spam their competitors.

I would expect both things to occur. Web of Trust among relays and inter-relay attacks.

That is a good point. Nostr users do not need to be Bitcoin users. Notaries may choose to accept lightning, but also cashu, fiat, shitcoins, or whatever they want. Commercial Nostr portals such as Primal may offer notarization to their paying users, or even to all their users, as long as they find a way to monetize it. In the end, the only thing that matters is whether notarization fees are more economical than the infrastructure cost of a free service that can be abused.

Just need to cascading delegated moderation. My set of trusted npubs and those trusted npubs set of trusted npubs all work to define spam for me. When I mark something or someone as spam the people who trust me also benefit from this action. If someone is going rogue I can eliminate them from my web of trust. Paygates are the death of social networking.