Anonymous, PoW based identities and actions (views, likes)

[steliosrammos]

This a three-part proposal for creating fully anonymous identities and private likes/views on Nostr, using ZK-proofs.

Part 1: Anonymous, PoW-based identities

The motivation behind this is to have:

• Fully anonymous identities on Nostr (with no correlation analysis possible)
• Sybil-resistance so these identities cannot spam events without cost
• Identity-level PoW (instead of PoW for each event), which can be upgraded/accumulated over time

This is covered by NIP-X.

Part 2: Anonymous Likes/Views

With the anonymous identity primitives, we could then have certain anonymous actions published by those identities. Think:

• Fully private likes
• Fully private view statistics.

This is covered by NIP-Y.

Part 3: Bitcoin-fee-based Identity PoW

Finally, I am proposing a way that you could replace PoW with a provable Bitcoin-based fee payment, which does not involve burning Bitcoin, in NIP-Z.

Caveat

All NIPs are mostly conceptual. They rely on ZK-proofs and I am certainly not a ZK-proof expert to do a thorough analysis to know if this is feasible in practice or not.

There are certainly trade-offs with this approach, like a degree of centralisation around MRPs and complexity for clients. My hope is that the discussion can clarify those trade-offs, take what's useful/doable in this proposal and leave out what's not.