Many people on twitter and nostr have started commenting that they’re seeing large amounts of tiny transactions on lightning with a message or a link attached.
Enter, the era of lightning spam.
Stacker news had the same concern and the culprit, the team behing Satograms replied.
https://stacker.news/items/316903/r/LoveIsBitcoin
We have observed the emergence of several services recently, where users can simply input their lightning address and receive small ad messages in their wallets from advertisers who pay 1-5 sats via keysend once in a while.
Two examples of such services are Satogram (https://satogram.xyz/) and EagleSats (https://eaglesats.com/).
However, there are some concerns:
- Spam prevention: What if User X does not wish to receive ads, but User Y adds User X’s LN address? Currently, there seems to be no easy way to remove an LN address once it has been added. EagleSats mentions that you have to send them an e-mail to request deletion, that doesn’t seem right.
- Potential abuse: There is a possibility of individuals with questionable intentions creating multiple wallets (1000+) and adding them to these services to receive free sats, exploiting the system.
While the idea is cool, the execution is bad.
@Onions
Hey now. We are the Satogram team. Many of the replies here are accurate but we’ll do a summary:
- most lightning addresses pulled from nostr where people publicly shared them.
- place on our site to manually add your node pubkey or lightning address
- to be removed off the list, we need proof you control the node or lightning address, otherwise you ‘d be able to remove other people’s addresses/pubkeys
- we want wallets to add a filter users can set so that they don’t see Satograms under a certain sat value (Zeus has done this) . Or, a separate Satogram “folder”
- All satograms are tagged with a custom record field so that the htlc can be identified as a Satogram as opposed to a regular payment
- Wallets who embrace Satograms have a new revenue stream. I.e. custodial wallets can collect some of the sats, or for extra fee feature the Satograms (phone notification, special icon, clickable links, embedded images, etc)
Perhaps an AMA would be good.
Seeking any and all feedback.
@satograms
That’s the users mostly. The lightning devs were not impressed, Dr. Calle simply put up a filter on lightningtipbot. Payments <21 sats are hidden, and if the message includes a link, it’s hidden for <100 sats. “Pay up, spammers!” he commented.
And Evan Kaloudis of Zeus Lightning Wallet simply filtered all notification spam altogether
Evan is chill like that.
While the devs on Satogram (The notorious Bob the coder who has done other shenanigans before without asking for permission from anybody) have put up an option to remove your lightning address from their database, the truth is that anyone can add your public lightning address to the list.
Personally I like the system and I plan to use it for marketing purposes, but only as long as the users are happy about receiving the messages. Otherwise it’s spam, that’s literally the definition of it, unwanted messages.
While proof of work through paying sats makes spam costly and the recipient more willing to accept it, I’m afraid it will quickly become tiresome and many will filter these out.
In contrast to zapvertising where people have been favourable to being approached, this one feels spammy indeed and many are complaining online.
Obviously, the first reaction I had was that people can spam me all they want if I’m going to get paid sats for it. I went ahead and added my multiple lightning wallets to the https://satogram.xyz/ website so you don’t have to.
The result is exactly as I expected, all my lightning wallets are getting spammed roughly at the same time with 1 sat and I get notifications for every one. Meaning they will have to add a filter or I will have to disable notifications. Getalby already filters under 1000 sat messages and emails, and it seems more wallets will have to implement some kind of spam filtering pretty soon.
What do you think?
Are you happy to be getting spam since it means you’ll be getting paid in sats or not?
