Comment by victorbjorklund
1 day ago
There is still an opportunity cost. They can scrape just your site or they can scrape 100 other sites without POW (no idea if it is 10, 100 etc)
1 day ago
There is still an opportunity cost. They can scrape just your site or they can scrape 100 other sites without POW (no idea if it is 10, 100 etc)
Websites aren't really fungible like that, and where they are (like general search indexing for example), that's usually the least hostile sort of automated traffic. But if that's all you care about, I'll cede the point.
Usually if you're going to go through the trouble of integrating a captcha, you want to protect against targeted attacks like a forum spammer where you don't want to let the abusive requests through at all, not just let it through after 5000ms.
So it's the same as a sleep()
No, because the bot can just also sleep and scrape other sources in that time. With pow, you waste their CPU cycles and block them from doing other work.