How could we do public zap receipts without involving a trusted third-party (like the Lightning server) or tracking the transaction? Could the recipient issue the receipt, in response to a message from the payer?
It seems like the receipt is primarily to the advantage of the recipient. If they had to expend some cost, effort, or PoW to publish the receipt, they'd be disinclined to fake it. They'd also be disinclined to bother publishing receipts for 1 sat zaps, which would put upward pressure on the zap amounts. Then you wouldn't need to include the amount, as the amount would tend be above a certain threshhold, so that the receipt merely existing is some proof of the minimum value of the zap.
Just pondering this. It seems mostly like an economic and cryptographic conundrum, which means it can perhaps be solved for.
But maybe that's a stupid idea. ππ€·π»ββοΈ
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That would also mean you could pay to any target, right? π€
This person paid money to this other person and it definitely was more than 1 sat.
I was just thinking the recipient could confirm the request with an attestation.
If you loaded the attestation with PoW (which clients already have), that would discourage cheating. You could increase the difficulty to signal higher amounts, even.
With this. Jumble handles this, but I could never think of a use case for it.
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Iβm currently running through scenarios that would make Essayist work without zap receipts which are actually great as a three way check on membership: the sender, the recipient and the relay can all agree that itβs valid, and they all also have an option to object. Itβs just really obvious.
Attestations could just be published only to the one relevant relay, and the recipient has an incentive to confirm a payment, so readers stick around for next month.
Oh, that's true! Very clever. Yes, that's a stable **trust triangle**.
I guess in my scenario, the PoW service is the third side. You always need a third, impartial side. Using a Lightning service made a lot of sense, but you could switch it with some other impartial side.
People can still cheat, but cheating is effectively discouraged.


I agree. I've always felt that zaps should somehow be used as a penalty for spammers. If nothing else, give me a ton of settings and filters for whatever spam mechanism is tied to zaps. I know some people hate having money tied to Nostr but even the centralized platforms have practically given into the spammers. It's fucking everywhere. I'd rather pay 21 sats to send you a note than have my view filled with spam. We can try to centralize and filter all we want, but I think economic pain is a more reliable approach. And it would be cool if it could somehow help fund development. I know everyone wants free but the cost of that has become too high, in my opinion.
I guess we could add a way to exempt people we follow. Like you get a pass with my follow. Everyone else, pay or fuck off.
Obviously the note would still be there, but that doesn't mean I need to see it. I guess we could just filter all notifications by follow, but I'm okay with giving others a way through in case they have something interesting to say. It'll just cost them to prove that worth. Not sure how you'd do all the verification stuff though. None of these issues have simple answers.
Well, I allow all public zap receipts to write to TheForest π² and I surface them at the top of the threads on Imwald. From where anyone can respond to them. So, they're like super-chats.