Stuart Bowman on Nostr: I think PoW is necessary to tilt the balance of power toward defenders in the spam ...

I think PoW is necessary to tilt the balance of power toward defenders in the spam war. But there's still the question of what is "interesting" content. WoT is probably the best thing we have right now, i.e. the "note that was upvoted by trusted user is considered popular" approach. But even in a web of trust, the long term solution can't just be total number of followers (even when considering followers of followers of followers) because it's trivially easy now to create an army of fake people. A determined adversary could boost their own signal. On a fundamental level there needs to be a source of scarcity to ground the web of trust in finite reality (like how btc uses the energy conservation principle). The way I see it, scarcity in a social context can be:

1) A hand-picked list of "trusted root nodes" of the web of trust (so not actually decentralized) or,

2) Derived from something else that is scarce (so probably money)

This is my current understanding — by no means do I think like I have this all figured out!