How about backing Nostr events (or pubkeys) with timelocked fidelity bonds as an alternative/addition to proof-of-burn?
This seems to mitigate the perverse incentive you mention at the end of your paper:
> "Interestingly, this proposal creates an incentive for Bitcoin miners to spam unprotected Nostr relays, in order to force users to pay for their posts."
With a bond, the cost is capital lock-up rather than a per event sacrifice, so miners don’t receive the "attention fee" itself (only normal on-chain transaction fees). And the bond is still globally verifiable by anyone with a Bitcoin node.
The math on how bonds could be valued compared to burns is explained here:
> https://gist.github.com/chris-belcher/87ebbcbb639686057a389acb9ab3e25b
(Although, if bonds were per event, I suspect the quadratic factor should be removed. However, if bonds are per pubkey for sybil resistance the quadratic factor makes sense.)
To avoid UTXO bloat, I suspect a notary could aggregate many small user timelocks into a single on-chain bond UTXO using an Ark-like construction, while still giving each user a unilateral exit path after the timelock if the notary stops cooperating. I'm unsure about the details though.
This seems to mitigate the perverse incentive you mention at the end of your paper:
> "Interestingly, this proposal creates an incentive for Bitcoin miners to spam unprotected Nostr relays, in order to force users to pay for their posts."
With a bond, the cost is capital lock-up rather than a per event sacrifice, so miners don’t receive the "attention fee" itself (only normal on-chain transaction fees). And the bond is still globally verifiable by anyone with a Bitcoin node.
The math on how bonds could be valued compared to burns is explained here:
> https://gist.github.com/chris-belcher/87ebbcbb639686057a389acb9ab3e25b
(Although, if bonds were per event, I suspect the quadratic factor should be removed. However, if bonds are per pubkey for sybil resistance the quadratic factor makes sense.)
To avoid UTXO bloat, I suspect a notary could aggregate many small user timelocks into a single on-chain bond UTXO using an Ark-like construction, while still giving each user a unilateral exit path after the timelock if the notary stops cooperating. I'm unsure about the details though.