4 ms·
You're right that there is an electricity cost to solving this type of captcha - the same as there is an electricity cost to loading 2MB of JS+images and clicki
by protoduction 6y ago
You're right that there is an electricity cost to solving this type of captcha - the same as there is an electricity cost to loading 2MB of JS+images and clicking the pictures with the fire hydrants (and the infrastructure behind that). It's hard to estimate how they compare (and what value you assign to the human labor performed and privacy loss).
20 seconds would be a fairly high difficulty. It's up to the site owner to decide what makes sense for them.
If anybody comes up with a useful computational task with a small bundle size that can be verified cheaply that would be the holy grail - until then the computation is only there as a form of hashcash.
- olliej 6y ago20s doesn’t matter when it’s someone else’s hardware (eg spammers using malware installed on victim machines). It’s also nonsense to compare the computational cost of N seconds of sustained, maxed out useless computation to the milliseconds of compute time needed to decode an image, or the minimal power usage of waiting on network data.