Comment by 0x696C6961
15 hours ago
It would be cool if the POW could be done ahead of time. That way I don't get stuck waiting while I'm working. Some type of credit/tokens that my browser could then spend.
15 hours ago
It would be cool if the POW could be done ahead of time. That way I don't get stuck waiting while I'm working. Some type of credit/tokens that my browser could then spend.
I'm working on this with a private prototype. I'm probably going to lean towards using a Service Worker (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Service_Wor...) to renew challenges at a reduced difficulty. Stay tuned!
That just creates another problem: if you're taking any measures to reduce tracking (ie. clearing cookies on shutdown or using temporary containers), this won't work. If anubis was being deployed on a site that a user visits often (eg. HN), the user might be convinced to whitelist it, but most anubis deployments are on random blogs or fediverse instances that I might not visit again in months. I'm certainly am not going to whitelist those sites, nor am I going to enable cookies wholesale just to avoid solving challenges.
Look, if you're going out of your way to break expected behaviour on websites you shouldn't be surprised when people code to the most common denominator and then you have weird subtle breakage as a result.
5 replies →
Or something that shadier websites could calculate ahead of time in your browser, then spend on your behalf.
I feel like Anubis is ironically speedrunning a lot of discoveries the crypto folks have already made several years ago...
What if the work output was bound to a particular source IP? That'd stop most "theft" at the expense of discards when your device switches networks.
Anubis does this. Happy Eyeballs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Eyeballs), IPv6 privacy extensions (https://oneuptime.com/blog/post/2026-01-15-ipv6-privacy-exte...), and devices migrating between home and mobile IP addresses as the person moves have all caused issues with this. Fixing this is hard, but I have been trying.
Privacy Pass does something similar to what you describe: https://developers.cloudflare.com/waf/tools/privacy-pass/
I wonder if you could convince the Anubis author to implement x402 payments to bypass the PoW
This could be done at the web server level, not requiring changes to Anubis
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Then we could implement an exchange, so that if you generate too much Anubis POW, you could exchange it with others.
We could link it to a site, you generate for HN, I for Reddit, but it so happens that you visited Reddit more and I HN, so we depleted our Anubis POW, so we could exchange some Reddit Anubis with some HN Anubis.
And then, we can inextricably link it to a new cryptocurrency -- let's call it BotCoin -- and make Sam Altman pay for it!
Basically reinventing crypto one step at the time.