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That's a very different issue. When malicious users were abusing our trial accounts at work, I tried to find alternative solutions that would slow them down, b
by phyzome 8y ago
That's a very different issue.
When malicious users were abusing our trial accounts at work, I tried to find alternative solutions that would slow them down, but the implementing team had already exhausted all the usual tricks and in the end I didn't really have anything to offer. And they went with ReCAPTCHA, since unfortunately that seems to be one of the better options at the moment.
I think the best option might be something as CPU-hungry as a coin miner, maybe just burn through a bunch of hashes as a proof of work, but smartphones have such limited CPU that it's not clear to me you could reach a threshold that would be acceptable to phone users but not to the bots.
- pietroglyph 8y agoProof of work is an interesting angle… I think users might like it if it was an opt-in to avoid captchas. You could have a relatively viable product where users can either do tasks hard for computers a la ReCAPTCHA (and 3rd parties can put in tasks, like MTurk), or users can opt in to a mining script for a couple of minutes. Both can be monetized.
- phyzome 8y agoMy original thought was that the account creation page (or whatever needed to be gated) would do the mining and send the server a small amount of e.g. Monero. And alternatively, if you didn't want your device to actually mine the Monero, perhaps because you don't allow scripts, you could instead have your browser send that small amount directly from your own wallet. :-P ...but people have browser extensions to sniff out miners now, so a more generic proof of work is probably safer.