MachuPikacchu on Nostr: The idea with all these impersonator accounts is that they can make it near ...

The idea with all these impersonator accounts is that they can make it near impossible for newcomers to find the real accounts in a sea of fakes.

Imagine coming to Nostr for the first time and seeing your favorite bitcoiner’s name repeated 20 times with the same follower lists (different npubs of course) and replicated content. If you want to zap them, get advice, etc which npub do you choose?

WoT can still work if you can trust a subset of the npubs but it becomes tricky. Simple heuristics like the time that content is published can help but as bots get faster and older content drops off relays it becomes near impossible to tell the difference. The timestamp in Nostr events is truncated to the second (according to NIP-01) which is plenty of margin for a bot to act.

We’ll overcome, but we’ve got work to do.