Sounds like a free rider problem.
It has to be a cheap enough solution that the majority of the population can join but it has to cost enough that it is a barrier so smammer can't afford to spam..
All while, you have to make it simple enough for the masses.
That's where the relay problem comes into play. It's too confusing for the masses. I don't understand what half of these relay buttons do on Amethyst. I've seen the question asked multiple times but never seen it answered.
I've signed up for a paid relay but not sure of the full benifits of that are.
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Proof of Work was originally meant to solve this problem, not the Byzantine Generals problem of transaction finality across decentralized participants.
It was a spam prevention proposal. Require someone prove they're a normal user with limited activity by doing a quite large amount of work that wouldn't bother a normal person making 1 post per minute or so. The problem is that this seems to be a phone first ecosystem and work is hard on a phone's battery.
What if clients start to be small relays themselfs? Is this technically possible? This way everybody using it contributes. Something like what ipfs does with files.