Making The Spam Bots Work

Spamming is still a major problem on email and bulletin boards. Why? Because it is free to post things and does not require a good deal of work. If it was more costly, it would likely result in much less spam. With Bitcoin, we make it difficult for the miners by asking them to find a nonce value for a block so that the hash of the block has a predefined number of zeroes. This means that each miner must commit a given amount of work in order to become part of the mining process. It will then be too costly for an adversary to try and take over the mining process, as they would have to invest in a large amount of hardware and pay for the associated energy costs. In the following, we see that the hash value of the block has a given number of zeros for the hash of the block:

With Nostr (Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays). we can use NIP-13 to generate a Proof of Work for notes and where we have a preceeding number of zero values for rthe ID. This provides a way of showing computation work. Overall it is used to deter spamming bots — as each of them would have to create considerable amount of work to produce spam messages. The difficulty is defined by the number of leading zero bits in the event ID. For example, if we have an…