Pay Per Note

[Isaac Eiter]

Hi,

Are there any solutions/attempts at pay-per-note? I've been thinking about adding an e-cash style payment as a condition for post acceptance on a relay implementation. The idea would be to have a very small payment for each post to deter spam.

• Add a tag with a token
  • con: the used token is included with event storage, which seems inefficient
  • pro: one data transfer per post
  • acceptance could be something like ["OK", true, "valid payment token"]

• Require a token to be sent (using an ephemeral event) prior to accepting any post from a given client
  • con: requires an additional back and forth with the client for each post
  • pros: no need to store payment data with the notes
  • workflow:
    • Client sends post, relay responds with "payment required"
    • Client sends token, relay responds with either "accepted" or "invalid token" (or mint, or whatever...)
    • if client sees token accepted, then send the event per normal Nip01
• Lightning payment?
  • I'm not familiar with lightning on a technical level, but maybe could do a lightning payment with the event ID embedded
  • con: need lightning infrastructure, wouldn't be in-band so maybe more difficult to coordinate / more overhead
  • pro: less custodial risk

[William Casarin]

On Mon, Aug 07, 2023 at 07:57:37PM -0700, Isaac Eiter wrote:
>Hi,
>
>Are there any solutions/attempts at pay-per-note? I've been thinking about
>adding an e-cash style payment as a condition for post acceptance on a
>relay implementation. The idea would be to have a very small payment for
>each post to deter spam.

Most people just charge to whitelist your pubkey out of band. Then you
would have some quota, let's say pay 10 bucks to send for the next month
or for the next 1000 notes. This is how most paid relays work and it's
less invasive to the protocol.