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
- 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.
- 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.
- Pseudonymous, not KYC
- You can be “anon with a lightning wallet.”
- Your wallet and reputation are what matter, not your passport.
- 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
- Download app / web client.
- Create keypair (your identity).
- Deposit sats (on-chain or LN) to:
- Set up stake balance
- Fund action wallet for posting / DM fees
- 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:
- Tap “Message”.
- See: “This user’s DM price: 500 sats.”
- You pay; most goes to them, small fee to protocol.
- 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?
- Reputation + slashing:
- Their accounts get flagged quickly → stake slashed hard.
- Dynamic pricing:
- Relays can auto‑raise min sats temporarily (like surge pricing) when spam detected.
- 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:
- Sats‑denominated subscriptions
- Monthly 10,000 sats to follow premium content.
- Paid threads / courses
- Pay X sats to unlock a whole thread or collection.
- On‑chain proof badges
- “OG User”, “Top Curator”, “Top Tipper” → minted as NFTs/ordinals if desired, but keep optional.
- 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).