Hi ZmnSCPxj, >>> - Locking the up-front fees for a time, then reverting them to the >>> original sender. >> >> This means that I can burst-spam today, wait until unlock, repeat. If the >> PoW scheme somehow enforces fresh PoWs (e.g. by needing (nonce || recent >> block hash) as proof), I can't do this attack. > > But in order for PoW to actively limit spam, the PoW target must be high > enough that you can burst-spam today, wait until you get your *next* > passes-the-threshold PoW, repeat. > The difference is that PoW has more variance, but that variance itself can > limit non-spam usage (in much the same way that too high an up-front locktime > would also limit non-spam usage).
We wouldn't be able to burst-spam with PoW if it was (nonce || recent block hash || recipient public key). Including the pubkey there makes sense anyway. We can further concatenate some kind of `secret_to_get_fees` in the PoW so that P the payer can't outsource the PoW calculation to some service S without P trusting that S won't steal the fee. I.e. P can't buy the PoW. > Money represents the allocation of available energy (by the simple mechanism > of purchasing energy using money; the invisible hand is really the mechanism > which directs energy towards the production of goods that are demanded), and > PoW is a proof that somebody allocated available energy for the production of > the PoW. I think I understand now the root of our disagreement, please correct me if I'm wrong. You are saying that PoWs, being a scarce resource, have a market value. In other words, we can engineer PoW in a way that it can be bought for money. I'm saying that PoW and fees are not blindly interchangeable as an anti-spam measure for LN. (Heck, even the various versions of PoW we devised in this thread are not interchangeable!) I'm further saying that we don't know whether every PoW-based scheme can be transformed to an equivalent fee-based scheme. In this sense, I believe we are both right. The argument "there is a market price for PoW, therefore PoW and fees are equivalent, therefore we can use fees and PoW interchangeably for LN anti-spam" is not correct though. Just s/PoW/sneakers and the reason will become obvious. (This substitution is OK because neither sneakers nor PoWs can be converted back to abstract energy and reused to produce different goods, only exchanged for other manufactured goods or money.) Best, Orfeas -- The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336. _______________________________________________ Lightning-dev mailing list Lightning-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/lightning-dev
