this is an increasingly common situation. it goes something like:
- i have a free, niche resource
- it becomes too popular
- i make it more efficient
- now it's really popular, and people are "abusing" it
- let's make them proof-of-work
- ... and proof-of-work harder
- but now "legitimate" users can't use it
- ???
the core problem is that the average person uses a mobile device where work is expensive, and the "attackers" use servers where work is cheap. if you require expensive proof-of-work, next comes a cheap-work-as-a-service where inefficient mobile devices pay small amounts of money to get efficient servers to complete their work for them. now everyone has an interest in making their usage efficient, but there's still an obvious inefficiency in the system: why have people pay unknown 3rd parties to burn cpu cycles to reduce costs for a free service, when you could just have people make small payments that cover the service's costs?
which is called l402/x402. micropayments' day has come
What's actually stopping them isn't the PoW, it's the customisation effort. If one site has Anubis nothing scrapes it. If many sites have Anubis they write counter scrapers. Today if you make a slight change to the Anubis algorithm on your site, they'll burn CPU endlessly computing hashes with the original algorithm and submitting wrong ones.
The author of Anubis hates this fact and will ban you if you mention it, so don't. He insists it's the PoW.
Searching around for this, found "make users click the mouse three times"[1] as an anti-bot idea. Generally, makes sense that smaller site owners can make small customizations to existing anti-bot tech and see positive results until they're either (1) deemed valuable enough to receive custom attention or (2) the scrapers include LLM-based anti-antibot methods.
>will ban you if you mention it
Even if mentioned really politely?
[1] would hope anyone trying this makes it accessible to visitors with disabilities
which is called l402/x402. micropayments' day has come