It is not. It has been proven over many times that PoW is not a solution to preventing spam/abuse, especially when identities are disposable.
Hashcash did not take off.
Very few CAPTCHAs use PoW (with all of them being small ones), and all that do only have global dififculty thresholds.
Anubis doesn’t stop abuse via PoW but just that dumb bots don’t run any JS. It is trivial to bypass at scale.
On Nostr, PoW has been discussed since the beginning and no one seriously uses it.
PoW concentrates power in the hands of spammers where they can acquire powerful GPUs and CPUs, and abuse them at very low cost.
Real users suffer as their HW is way slower and UX matters.
semisol
npub122…cgrkj
2026-06-07 16:46:48 UTC
in reply to nevent1q…xv07
Author Public Key
npub12262qa4uhw7u8gdwlgmntqtv7aye8vdcmvszkqwgs0zchel6mz7s6cgrkjPublished at
2026-06-07 16:46:48 UTCEvent JSON
{
"id": "b99a6c35bae5704a21ef06cce333db8dbfe7abf8d428e04012b6c6e92b448a85",
"pubkey": "52b4a076bcbbbdc3a1aefa3735816cf74993b1b8db202b01c883c58be7fad8bd",
"created_at": 1780850808,
"kind": 1,
"tags": [
[
"e",
"00003b57d9c7575fadd4eebd01ceeccf89c3885edbc34b06282bd88ec06ed4ba",
"",
"root"
],
[
"e",
"00002f785097a760a4e6a37e8ff2892e819d10b108153bb82b1f5957241794bb",
"wss://relay.damus.io",
"reply",
"00000000827ffaa94bfea288c3dfce4422c794fbb96625b6b31e9049f729d700"
],
[
"p",
"00000000827ffaa94bfea288c3dfce4422c794fbb96625b6b31e9049f729d700"
]
],
"content": "It is not. It has been proven over many times that PoW is not a solution to preventing spam/abuse, especially when identities are disposable.\n\nHashcash did not take off.\n\nVery few CAPTCHAs use PoW (with all of them being small ones), and all that do only have global dififculty thresholds.\n\nAnubis doesn’t stop abuse via PoW but just that dumb bots don’t run any JS. It is trivial to bypass at scale.\n\nOn Nostr, PoW has been discussed since the beginning and no one seriously uses it.\n\nPoW concentrates power in the hands of spammers where they can acquire powerful GPUs and CPUs, and abuse them at very low cost.\n\nReal users suffer as their HW is way slower and UX matters.",
"sig": "219dac4b9ef8f6134870812f7a386303e59e8c50f30a8d4fbb70e6959eea79155e9a95163d5d6db7af8079e94d3ea26e658be312e0a71728f2bf98b22d535b1d"
}