Comment on Anubis is awesome and I want to talk aout it
cadekat@pawb.social 3 weeks agoScarcity is what powers this type of challenge: you have to prove you spent a certain amount of electricity in exchange for access to the site, and because electricity isn’t free, this imposes a dollar cost on bots.
You could skip the detour through hashes/electricity and do something with a proof-of-stake cryptocurrency, and just pay for access. The site owner actually gets compensated instead of burning dead dinosaurs.
Obviously there are practical roadblocks to this today that a JavaScript proof-of-work challenge doesn’t face, but longer term…
You could skip the detour through hashes/electricity and do something with a proof-of-stake cryptocurrency, and just pay for access. The site owner actually gets compensated instead of burning dead dinosaurs.
Maybe if the act of transferring crypto didn’t use a comparable or greater amount of energy…
That’s why I specified a proof-of-stake cryptocurrency. They use so much less energy that it is practically negligible in comparison, and more on the order of traditional transactions.
I think the issue is that many sites are too aggressive with it. Anubis can be configured to only ask for challenges if the site is under unusual load, for instance when a botnet it’s actually ddosing the site. That’s when it shines.
Making it constantly ask for challenges when the service is not under attack is just a massive waste of energy. And many sites just enable it constantly because they can defer bot pings from their logs that way. That’s for instance what op is doing. It’s just a big misunderstanding of the tool.
natecox@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
The cost here only really impacts regular users, too. The type of users you actually want to block have budgets which easily allow for the compute needed anyways.
chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
I think maybe they wouldn’t if they are trying to scale their operations to scanning through millions of sites and your site is just one of them
cadekat@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
Yeah, exactly. A regular user isn’t going to notice an extra few cents on their electricity bill (boiling water costs more), but a data centre certainly will when you scale up.