Comment by LeoPanthera

The core problem isn't Proof-of-Work itself — it's difficulty calibration.

PoW for page protection (every page load) is fundamentally different from PoW for form submission (one-time action). Anubis at difficulty 8 is asking browsers to find 8 leading zero bytes — that's billions of hashes on average.

For form spam protection, a ~200ms solve time in a WebWorker is enough to make bot operations uneconomical at scale (10,000 forms = 10,000 unique computations) while being invisible to humans. That's difficulty 2-3 depending on device.

For protecting every page view like Anubis does, the cost-benefit math is different and much harder to get right, because you're taxing every visitor on every request — not just on submit.

I think that must be the point they're trying to make, yes

It also drives home that Anubis needs a time estimate for sites that don't use Anubis as a "can you run javascript" wall but as an actual proof of work mechanism that it purports to be its main mechanism

It shows a difficulty of "8" with "794 kilohashes per second", but what does that mean? I understand the 8 must be exponential (not literally that 8 hashes are expected to find 1 solution on average), but even as a power of 2, 2^8=256 I happen to know by heart, so thousands of hashes per second would then find an answer in a fraction of a second. Or if it's 8 bytes instead of bits, then you expect to find a solution after like 8 million hashes, which at ~800k is about ten seconds. There is no way to figure out how long the expected wait is even if you understand all the text on the page (which most people wouldn't) and know some shortcuts to do the mental math (how many people know small powers of 2 by heart)

I waited a minute until my phone got hot.