Imagine Twitter + WhatsApp + Patreon… but every action is priced in sats, and bots literally can’t afford to exist.

Let’s design it.

1. Name & One‑Line Pitch

Working name: SATOSPHERE

“A Bitcoin-native social network where every interaction is a Satoshi‑level economic signal, not free spam.”

• Runs on Bitcoin + Lightning for instant, tiny payments.  
• Everything important (accounts, posts, DMs) is tied to real economic cost in sats, not captchas or KYC.

2. Core Principles

1. Read for free, write with skin in the game
   
   • Browsing feeds, profiles, and public posts is free.
   • Creating impact (posting, commenting, DM’ing strangers, mass following) requires sats.
3. Economic Sybil resistance
   
   • A bot can generate infinite emails, but not infinite sats.
   • Every new identity and every outgoing action costs sats or locks sats as collateral.
5. Pseudonymous, not KYC
   
   • You can be “anon with a lightning wallet.”
   • Your wallet and reputation are what matter, not your passport.
7. Open protocol, multiple clients
   
   • Aim to be more like Nostr / AT Protocol than a walled garden.  
   • Anyone can build a client or relay; the economic rules are part of the protocol.

3. The Anti‑Bot Engine: “Satoshi Shield”

3.1 Account Creation = Stake

• To create an account, you stake a small amount of sats, e.g. 50,000 sats.
• That stake sits in a smart contract / covenant-like construction or LN escrow governed by the protocol rules:
  
  • If your account accumulates spam flags from high‑reputation users or relays, a slice of your stake is slashed.
  • If you behave well for X months and build rep, your effective stake requirement falls or is partially released.

Result:

A bot farm that wants 100k fake accounts must lock 50,000 sats * 100k = 5 billion sats. Brutal.

3.2 Per‑Action Microfees

Every outgoing action has a sats cost:

Action	Cost (example)	Where it goes
Create new post	10 sats	Mostly burned or paid to relays
Comment on post	3 sats	Part to author, part to relays
Like / React	1 sat	To the creator (optional: “soft like” with no fee)
Reply to DM	1–5 sats	To the other side
DM someone you don’t know	Sender pays their price (see below)	To recipient + protocol cut

Think of it as paid weight on the network:

• High‑value content: people voluntarily spend sats to push it.
• Low‑effort bot spam: insanely expensive at scale.

3.3 “Attention Price” Per User

Inspired by ideas like “set a spam threshold fee” and proof‑of‑burn for attention pricing. 

Each user sets:

• Minimum sat price to DM me
• Minimum sat price to reply to my posts
• Minimum sat price to mention/tag me

Example:

• You: “DM price = 500 sats, Reply price = 5 sats.”
• Your friends / people you follow can be on a whitelist (free or cheaper).
• Randoms must literally buy a ticket to talk to you.

This kills most bot DMs overnight.

3.4 Dynamic Costs for New Accounts

New account = higher cost until reputation builds.

• First 7 days:
  
  • Posts cost 20 sats
  • Comments 10 sats
• After you get enough organic engagement from higher‑rep users, your action costs auto‑decrease.

This prevents a bot from cheaply spinning up and blasting.

3.5 Reputation + Slashing

Each account has a Reputation Score keyed to its public key or npub‑style ID (if we piggyback Nostr). 

Reputation sources:

• Age of account
• Volume of economic activity (both in and out)
• Ratio of positive to negative reactions
• Number of “spam/harm” flags from high‑rep humans

If you cross certain thresholds of bad behavior:

• You lose a slice of your staked sats.
• Your required per‑action cost goes up.
• In extreme cases, relays/servers auto‑shadowban you at the protocol level (based on shared reputation lists).

4. Tech Stack & Architecture

4.1 Protocol Layer

Two options:

Option A – Build directly on 

Nostr + Lightning

• Use Nostr events for posts, likes, DMs.  
• Use Lightning for:
  
  • Account stake channels
  • Per‑action microfees (zaps, but with protocol‑level rules rather than pure tipping)
• Run specialized relays that:
  
  • Only propagate events with valid payment proofs (on-chain or LN proof).
  • Enforce minimum sat cost per event (configurable per relay).

Pros: existing ecosystem, clients, tooling.

Cons: need careful design to avoid Nostr‑style spam relays; plus, some devs are skeptical of LN. 

Option B – Custom “SatLayer” Protocol

• Define a new protocol: messages + signed Bitcoin/LN proofs.
• Relays/servers verify:
  
  • Signature of the user
  • Proof they paid X sats to:
    
    • A burn address, or
    • A relay pool address, or
    • The target user.

Pros: clean, purpose‑built; no legacy baggage.

Cons: more engineering, slower adoption, fewer clients at launch.

4.2 Lightning Integration

We lean heavily on the Lightning Network:

• Instant sats flows for posts/DMs.
• Users can connect:
  
  • Their own LN node/wallet, or
  • Custodial lightning wallet for normies (at higher fee).

We can:

• Accept Keysend payments + memos for metadata.  
• Use onion‑routed payments for privacy so content and payments aren’t trivially linkable on-chain.

4.3 Data & Privacy

• All social content is signed by user keys.
• Relays store encrypted DMs.
• Users can:
  
  • Export their keys and relink to other clients.
  • Mute/block at client level; relays can collectively ignore badly-reputed keys.

No central “delete your account” power; only economic + reputation penalties and local moderation.

5. UX: How It Feels to Use

5.1 Onboarding

1. Download app / web client.
2. Create keypair (your identity).
3. Deposit sats (on-chain or LN) to:
   
   • Set up stake balance
   • Fund action wallet for posting / DM fees
5. Set:
   
   • DM price (e.g. 1,000 sats)
   • Reply price (e.g. 10 sats)
   • Visibility preferences (NSFW, language, etc.)

You’re live.

5.2 Posting Flow

• Tap “Post”.
• Write content.
• UI shows: “Cost: 10 sats · Your balance: 100,000 sats.”
• Hit send → Lightning micro‑payment fires → Relay accepts event with proof → Post appears.

If the network gets noisy, relays can raise their minimum sats per post. Supply/demand of attention.

5.3 DM Flow

Sending a DM to a stranger:

1. Tap “Message”.
2. See: “This user’s DM price: 500 sats.”
3. You pay; most goes to them, small fee to protocol.
4. They see: “New DM · You earned 450 sats”.

The more in‑demand a person is, the higher their DM price can go.

Your inbox becomes a paid consulting / feedback / connection engine, not a spam graveyard.

5.4 Content Discovery & Feeds

Feed ranking signal = blend of:

• Sats spent to publish / boost
• Engagement from high‑rep users
• Time decay (so it doesn’t just become “pay to pin forever”)

We can also allow boosts, e.g.:

• Spend 100 sats to boost your post in the “Explore” feed.
• Those sats get distributed to:
  
  • The relay(s)
  • A general creator rewards pool
  • Possibly some “viewers lottery” (random viewer gets 1 sat for scrolling).

6. Bot & Attack Analysis

What if a rich attacker buys tons of sats & still spams?

1. Reputation + slashing:
   
   • Their accounts get flagged quickly → stake slashed hard.
3. Dynamic pricing:
   
   • Relays can auto‑raise min sats temporarily (like surge pricing) when spam detected.
5. Network‑level lists:
   
   • Clients & relays share blocklists based on economic behavior; they can collectively null-route a spammer.

What about Lightning‑based botnets using LN itself for C2?

Research already shows it’s technically feasible to use LN for covert botnet communication. 

So we design monitoring & limits:

• Rate limits per wallet/channel for social actions.
• Heuristics on CN-style patterns:
  
  • Many new low‑rep keys funded from same cluster of UTXOs or nodes.
• Optional proof-of-human signals:
  
  • Signed attestations from known humans.
  • Human verification bounties (pay users to verify others with video/voice call, etc., but keep this optional to stay privacy-friendly).

7. Business Model

The protocol + flagship app make money by:

• Taking 1–3% cut from every micro‑payment:
  
  • Posts, boosts, DMs, subscriptions.
• Offering premium features:
  
  • Advanced analytics
  • Ad tools (but priced in sats, not attention theft)
  • Higher limits and lower per‑action costs for high‑reputation users.

Important:

No fiat, no web2 ad-tech sludge. It’s sats in, sats out.

8. Expansion Ideas

Once the base is working, we add:

1. Sats‑denominated subscriptions
   
   • Monthly 10,000 sats to follow premium content.
3. Paid threads / courses
   
   • Pay X sats to unlock a whole thread or collection.
5. On‑chain proof badges
   
   • “OG User”, “Top Curator”, “Top Tipper” → minted as NFTs/ordinals if desired, but keep optional.
7. Inter‑protocol bridges
   
   • Mirror selected posts to Nostr, Bluesky, ActivityPub with payment proofs attached.  

9. Concrete Spec Snapshot

If you wanted to turn this into a 1‑pager for devs / investors:

• Identity: Secp256k1 keypair; optional Nostr-compatible npub.
• Payments: Bitcoin Lightning (primary), on‑chain for large stake moves.
• Stake: Minimum 50,000 sats locked per identity; slashing based on network‑wide reputation.
• Action Costs (v1 defaults):
  
  • Post = 10 sats
  • Comment = 3 sats
  • Like = 1 sat
  • DM to non-followers = user’s custom price (min 100 sats)
• Moderation: Client + relay level, using:
  
  • Blocklists
  • Reputation scores
  • Economic behavior (spam = expensive)
• Openness: Anyone can:
  
  • Run a relay enforcing these rules
  • Build a client UI around the protocol

If you want, next step I can:

• Turn this into a whitepaper outline, or
• Design the exact protocol spec (event formats, payment proof format, reputation algorithm), or
• Sketch a product roadmap (MVP → beta → full network).