It's wild to me that PoW systems are how we sort the bot problem... the bummer is that all this "work" is just wasted cycles, at least in crypto there is a token you can sell.

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Levitating 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> at least in crypto there is a token you can sell

That would defeat the purpose. The goal is to make scraping costly, not profitable.

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articulatepang 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Scraping would be costly in this world: scrapers would have to spend tokens in order to get the webpage.

But, in this world, the website owner would receive tokens that they can then use to do whatever they want, including paying for servers and bandwidth. This is the sense in which the cycles aren’t wasted: the website owner now has cash to spend.

Effectively, both scrapers and ordinary users would be paying for the privilege of getting website bytes.

This also solves the problem of having to wait for your phone to solve the challenge while you’re browsing: you can buy or mine some tokens ahead of time and pay them as soon as challenged. So can the scrapers, but because they’re accessing enormous numbers of pages it’s hopefully prohibitively expensive for them.

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cozzyd 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I guess it could in principle be profitable for the website, not the client?

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xosc 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

unfortunately at that point it would be indistinguishable from running cryptojacking on your website

	▲	LastTrain 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		No. The client is doing the work.

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TacticalCoder 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yup was thinking the same: make honest people pay $0.00001 when they visit the site (in electricity/compute), have the challenge made so that only the website wins a tiny something. Bleed the bots dry.

> This makes Anubis challenges use a memory-hard proof of work function (argon2id) instead of just a CPU hard one. It also means that the "hey Claude vibeslop me a CUDA Anubis solver" route is on its way to being fundamentally dead.

Nice.

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saagarjha 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sure, then just replace it with something that is useful to society but not immediately profitable to a scraper, like science research

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xena 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I want to do this eventually, but it's hard to split things into the micro-tasks that would be required to make this work on Anubis. One of the ideas I'm throwing around is a world where Anubis helps fuzz old games to find timesaves in tool-assisted speedruns. It's harder than you think.

	▲	brendoelfrendo 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This would be rad.

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odo1242 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well, there was CoinHive which did this exact thing 6-7 years ago, but that system got abused a bit much

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CarVac 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

PoW was originally anti-spam technology.