Comment by Levitating
15 hours ago
> at least in crypto there is a token you can sell
That would defeat the purpose. The goal is to make scraping costly, not profitable.
15 hours ago
> at least in crypto there is a token you can sell
That would defeat the purpose. The goal is to make scraping costly, not profitable.
Scraping would be costly in this world: scrapers would have to spend tokens in order to get the webpage.
But, in this world, the website owner would receive tokens that they can then use to do whatever they want, including paying for servers and bandwidth. This is the sense in which the cycles aren’t wasted: the website owner now has cash to spend.
Effectively, both scrapers and ordinary users would be paying for the privilege of getting website bytes.
This also solves the problem of having to wait for your phone to solve the challenge while you’re browsing: you can buy or mine some tokens ahead of time and pay them as soon as challenged. So can the scrapers, but because they’re accessing enormous numbers of pages it’s hopefully prohibitively expensive for them.
I guess it could in principle be profitable for the website, not the client?
unfortunately at that point it would be indistinguishable from running cryptojacking on your website
No. The client is doing the work.
1 reply →
Yup was thinking the same: make honest people pay $0.00001 when they visit the site (in electricity/compute), have the challenge made so that only the website wins a tiny something. Bleed the bots dry.
> This makes Anubis challenges use a memory-hard proof of work function (argon2id) instead of just a CPU hard one. It also means that the "hey Claude vibeslop me a CUDA Anubis solver" route is on its way to being fundamentally dead.
Nice.
[dead]
Sure, then just replace it with something that is useful to society but not immediately profitable to a scraper, like science research
I want to do this eventually, but it's hard to split things into the micro-tasks that would be required to make this work on Anubis. One of the ideas I'm throwing around is a world where Anubis helps fuzz old games to find timesaves in tool-assisted speedruns. It's harder than you think.
The tools that exist for fuzzing speedruns (TASers call it "botting") are fairly primitive, excluding a few game-specific ones. Because of that, there really aren't that many TASes where a distributed randomised search could make improvements which don't get immediately overshadowed within a day of human attention. Improving botting tools and increasing their adoption would be more effective IMO. (Incidentally, TASVideos.org recently banned one of the people pioneering bot development.)
Meanwhile BOINC is well-established as the platform for distributed computation. If you can figure out how to squeeze its work units into Wasm challenges, I'm sure a lot of researchers would thank you.
This would be rad.