I’m glad you like it!

I think a fidelity bond per npub is much better UX than a straight payment, since you eventually get your sats back while still providing similar Sybil resistance.

The idea gets even more powerful if the fidelity bond is on-chain, because then every relay can verify it, rather than only the relay that received a payment.

Of course, this doesn’t scale well if every individual user needs their own on-chain bond. But I think we could aggregate lots of small fidelity bonds into a single on-chain transaction that commits to the set of npubs and their respective bond amounts (see the Proof of Burn paper by @ThomasV).

Could someone point me to a writeup where this is discussed in more detail? How do we deal with the cold start problem?

I think per npub fidelity bonds could help:

"I'm not willing to even process your posts, if you're not able to timelock X satoshis for your npub"

Banger.

> I think the only solution is to really make sure that today's miners don't see any value from the burning, so either notarizing to an OP_RETURN, or use CLTV to send it very far in the future

What do you think of this as a solution? I think it might address some of the perverse incentives of proof-of-burn, although it unfortunately loses the nice *security-budget* property.

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.

> insert plane_with_red_dots.jpg

But yeah, I agree for the most part

Rate limiting mechanism for nostr based on time locking sats.