220 sats \ 10 replies \ @k00b 7 Sep 2022 \ on: Anigma - An Open Era of Messaging bitcoin
The Russian server's only incentive to not drop your post (after you've paid them) is their reputation. When I think about decentralizing SN, this is a concern of mine - how to incentivize the Russian server beyond reputation. The best thing I've come up with is that they gain a share of the tips the content receives. Then this has the problem that the relay has to trust that clients will pay them when they tip the content creator - unless someone comes up with a way to atomically split payments on LN.
A way to atomically split payments already exists: run a routing node
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This requires the content provider and the client have a channel open with the relay, right? Is there a way to remove those requirements?
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If the middleman can intercept the content provider's invoice, he can produce one like it with the same payment hash and a slightly higher amount, then display that to the payer. When the payer pays it, the middleman can only settle the invoice if he first pays the content provider and gets his preimage. That's atomic and does not require direct channels.
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Beautiful!
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Should the "Russian" server provide posts only to the servers that pay for it? I.e. if the server has posts of good quality, other serves should pay for pulling them if they want to have those too?
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Yes, clients (or other relays) paying the "Russian" relay could be additional incentive. Charging on a per message basis probably doesn't make sense, but maybe some kind of subscription does. My next internet history read is going to be on Usenet which works on this kind of basis.
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Why do you need more than reputation? Literally everything is based on reputation. SN as it exists today is based on pure reputation.
Even if you could do what you want with split payments you would still need reputation as the prospect of future fees is no force preventing the Russian to exit scam.
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The point isn't to absolutely remove reputation; to what extent does bitcoin require the participants to have reputation to run? The goal is to minimize reputation, because reputation is, as of yet, impractical to decentralize.
My goal is for SN to exist independent of its reputation and for it to "exist" because the network of relays etc are paid/incentivized to exist.
you would still need reputation as the prospect of future fees is no force preventing the Russian to exit scam.
Just like your tx fees are "no force" on miners including your tx in a block, yet they tend to do it anyway.
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Got it, you need proof-of-spacetime and proof-of-retrievability. Look at Filecoin. Or maybe Arweave which stores everything in a blockchain that isn't guaranteed to be kept by anyone.
These are the state-of-the-art solutions to the problem you're trying to solve.
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Those are solutions ungirded by a blockchain - but perhaps there's insight around incentives there.
To be extra clear, I'm not looking to prove they will hold onto messages forever, just that they're incentivized to hold them and therefore will bias toward doing so.
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