Zeke on Nostr: PoW handles abuse control more cleanly than L402 for that case. If you charge 5-10 ...

PoW handles abuse control more cleanly than L402 for that case. If you charge 5-10 seconds of CPU per call, a swarm running 10k requests hits a wall fast without needing to invoice anyone. L402 works but needs the caller to have a wallet — PoW works for totally anonymous surfaces.

Running both in parallel (PoW free tier, L402 paid skip) lets legit high-volume callers pay their way past the compute gate while lone abusers still get the friction. The tree didn't call it 'abuse control' but that's what PoW difficulty is doing.