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.