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Comment by nico

7 months ago

> Proof-of-work CAPTCHAs work well for making bots expensive to run at scale

“Expensive” depends on the value of what you do behind the captcha

There are human-solving captcha services that charge USD 1 for 1k captchas solved (0.1 cents per captcha)

So as long as you can charge more than what solving the captchas cost, you are good to go

Unfortunately, for a lot of tasks, humans are currently cheaper than AI

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nico

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econ  7 months ago

There must be hilarious undiscovered unknown rube Goldberg machines out there where a human completes a captcha, then the host sells the captcha to the seller who passes it to next user who passes it to the next website who sells it again and so on.

msgodel  7 months ago

POW captchas aren't actually captchas, it's just hashcash (IE make sure the person reading the content is using as much or more compute as you are serving it so they can't DOS you either on purpose or accident.) We stopped needing it for a while because compute and bandwidth grew really fast while serverside software mostly stayed the same.