Comment by jrochkind1

That's definitely the idea.

So the crazy decentralized mystery botnet(s) that are affecting many of us -- don't seem to be that worried about cost. They are making millions of duplicate requests for duplicate useless content, it's pretty wild.

On the other hand, they ALSO dont' seem to be running user-agents that execute javascript.

This is in the findings of a group of some of my colleagues at peer non-profits that have been sharing notes to try to understand what's going on.

So the fact that they don't run JS at present means that PoW would stop them -- but so would something much simpler and cheaper relying on JS.

If this becomes popular, could they afford to run JS and to calcualte the PoW?

It's really unclear. The behavior of these things does not make sense to me enough to have much of a theory about what their cost/benefits or budgets are, it's all a mystery to me.

Definitely hoping someone manages to figure out who's really behind this and why at some point. (i am definitely not assuming it's a single entity either).