Comment by abetusk
3 hours ago
The bot problem can be solved.
Anubis is one such answer [0]. Cryptocurrency and micro transactions are another.
In the last few decades, spam was a problem because the marginal transaction costs of information exchange were orders of magnitude lower than they had been. Note that physical mail spam was, and still, is an issue. Focusing on perceptual or fuzzy computation as the limiting factor, through captchas and other 'human tests', allowed for most spam to be effectively mitigated.
Now that intelligence is becoming orders of magnitude cheaper, perceptual computation challenges no longer work, but we can still do computation challenges in the form of proof of work or proxies thereof. Spam will never wholly go away but we can at least cause more friction by charging bot networks to execute in the form of energy or money.
I don't see how Anubis solves anything. If a human lets the bot control a completely vanilla computer (which there is now a lot of tooling for), then how is it going to stop that?
At most, PoW makes it a bit annoying to scale: you need to add some form of RPC that delegates solving to a beefy+cheap Hetzner server. If you're really scaling and it's getting expensive, you can rent a GPU to do batch solves.
PoW systems like Anubis are self-soothing.