@lucas @lopp What happened is that the host of bitcoinhackers.org threw a fit and took his Mastodon instance offline entirely, suddenly and much earlier than he promised his users before, in order to get people to switch to #nostr immediately.

He intentionally crippled people's ability to use the built-in account migration, only to make a point about rug pulls being a potential problem with federated servers. However, he created that problem unnecessarily for his users by being a shitty host.

@raucao @lopp Wow wtf. Isn't he the one also managing the nostr bounty site?

nostr is pretty interesting but I’ve grown increasingly convinced the spam situation will get really bad the moment it’s worth it to spammers, and they’ll resort to pay-to-post. Pay-to-post is actually pretty neat incentives wise, but will be completely socially unacceptable to everybody except bitcoiners.

@ademan yea I tend to agree. There’s no easy solution to the spam/harassment problems, nostr pretends it doesn’t have one by handwaving about tried-and-failed solutions. :(

@ademan @lopp @matt I wonder if it makes sense to essentially have a javascript (or whatever) miner in the client, and make the posts so cheap that sending out something isn't free, but also not crazy expensive (for example, you could essentially only post once per 5 minutes 'for free'). That should prevent spam, make it still possible for btc-less people to post and also make the experience better for people who are willing to pay.

@lain Proof-of-Botnet :p. This is why PoW for email never took off, the economics actually don't work, botnets have more horsepower than normal folks, by far.

@matt But if they already use the botnet to mine, why not just keep the mined btc? they are already valuable. If they use the btc to send spam, then they could just do it with money from other sources for the same effect.

@lain Nah, mining bitcoin requires specialized hardware. Mining with random computers is generic.

I do think the PoW idea is interesting though, I think the nip for it even suggests users would pay a third party to do the work, so you essentially have pay-to-post except you can prove it to a third party, too (rather than pay-to-post-per-relay).

@ademan @lain Why not just proof-of-burned funds or something like that? The PoW is just extra steps.

I don’t like burning ;-) but maybe timelocked fidelity bonds could be a good solution.

@ademan The problem stands either way - most people don't want to pay to post, the value for them to post something to their 20 followers is substantially less than even a trivial cost. The value for a spammer to post is usually higher :(.

I think the incentives line up better per-identity than per-post, since a spammer burns the identity when they post anyway, but a normal user doesn’t.

@ademan in order to burn the identity you have to have (pay) someone to moderate and flag it as spam. That’s very expensive.

@lain@lain.com @ademan@thebag.social @lopp@lopp.social @matt@mastodon.bitcoin.ninja I think this is what steemit has been doing for a while?

I'm a bitcoiner and I find it unacceptable. Just cuz muh favorite crypto is in use doesn't mean I suddenly want to go blowing my money on dumb shit. Although tbf this may actually make posts higher quality if there's a monetary value attached