Comment by fc417fc802
5 hours ago
> Anubis wants "slow for bots but fast for humans"
That's not true. The goal is to raise the cost for bulk scrapers to the extent possible while minimizing any inconvenience to regular users. It's not about being slow for bots but rather reducing the asymmetry of the problem (from the perspective of the server) by imposing a (minor) cost on anyone requesting a page.
That's a better way to put the goal. But does it actually raise the cost or reduce asymmetry in a meaningful way? If it makes crawling 0-5% slower then it's really not worth the annoyance.
I know having the Anubis javascript at all gets in the way of some bots. But is the calculation helping enough?
> does it actually raise the cost or reduce asymmetry in a meaningful way?
It's complicated. I think anubis currently only collects low hanging fruit so to speak but in practice that's the bulk of what was causing problems so it's good enough.
PoW in general absolutely yes - I think monero clearly demonstrates this. Last I checked it remained viable to mine monero on at least somewhat low end and at least somewhat outdated consumer CPUs. It seems to me that fact implies that a well constructed PoW scheme can in practice squash the impact of any performance differences to within at most a couple orders of magnitude.