Spam consequence on perma-nodes?

Question

I know storage is cheap and that in the future the tangle will horizontally scale.

But I am thinking about bogus spam and its consequences for storage. I know they would be deleted after a snapshot. But a perma-node would keep a copy which seems senseless to me. Could this be a problem since the spammer could troll the perma-node owner this way (because he has to store his stupid spam). Or would this behaviour be non-existent in the future because abusive spamming will not make economic sense?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Iota uses POW to protect the tangle against abusive spamming. Spamming the network consume CPU/GPU power because you need to find the appropriate nonce for the spam transaction.

Already today, it doesn't make economic sense to spam the tangle. Unfortunately, it is not enough to prevent abusive spamming completely.

Spam can't be avoided, and despite the fact that it is not always harmful to the tangle, the best way to protect the tangle is probably through smart filtering/rate limiting algorithms on fullnodes to prevent the propagation of abusive spam. (i.e. each node "observe" transactions coming from neighbors/light-clients and decide to disconnect/ignore when abusive pattern is detected). Nelson already implements something like that (based on reputation of a node)

Once a spam transaction is in the tangle, it's difficult to get rid of it (apart with snapshoting). So, yes it will have an impact on permanodes, but what will be the cost of it is really difficult to predict.