Comment by qcnguy
3 days ago
You can't prevent spam like that. Rate limiting: based on what key? IP address? Botnets make it irrelevant.
Proof of work? Bots are infinitely patient and scale horizontally, your users do not. Doesn't work.
Micropayments: No such scheme exists.
PoW does seem to work, some Captchas do this already.
Also “identity”, what would that even mean?
Many countries at least in europe have digital identity systems. For example ID card which replaces passport and is a smartcard. You can sign documents and authenticate online services. All gov + many other services let you log in with this ID. I can also have an app on mobile for auth purposes which gives strong guarantees that the person A is actually the person A.
Anyways, I wonder if there is a service that unions all those official auth methods for countries so there would be a global solution for website login. Certainly there would still be countries left in the dark, like USA :(