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> The other alternatives all suck to the extent of my knowledge, they're either prohibitively convoluted, or web3 cryptocurrency micro-transaction nonsense that
by x-complexity 4y ago
> The other alternatives all suck to the extent of my knowledge, they're either prohibitively convoluted, or web3 cryptocurrency micro-transaction nonsense that while sure it would work, also monetizes every single interaction in a way that is more dystopian than the actual skull-crushing robot apocalypse.
In the interest of practicality: There's a way to go the web3 route without being laden with transactions:
- Mint a fixed-cost non-transferrable NFT to an address, with ownership limit of 1 per address.
- Use SIWE (sign-in with Ethereum) to verify ownership of address & therefore NFT.
- If malicious behaviour is detected, mark the NFT as belonging to a malicious actor at the server's end & block the account.
- Require non-malicious-marked NFTs in order to use the site/app.
At most, the user only had to perform 1 transaction (minting the non-transferrable NFT) on any blockchain network where the contract resides, & the costs to do so can be made cheaply with Layer 2 networks. (Polygon PoS, Arbtirum, Optimism, zkSync 2.0, etc)
Can this be done entirely without web3? Yes, but the added friction imposed onto malicious actors to generate new addresses & mint new non-transferrable NFTs increases the costs for them considerably.
> If anyone could go ahead and find a solution to this mess, that would be great, because it's absolutely suffocating the internet, and it's painful to think about all the wonderful little projects that get cancelled or abandoned when faced with the reality of having to deal with such an egregiously hostile digital ecosystem.
In all honesty, there's no perfect solution, just hard-to-make tradeoffs: The prevention of botspam inherently requires tracking in some form to resolve said issue, as there's no immediately-recognizable stateless solution for botspam tracking. Someone has to do the tracking to prevent botspam, which inherently involves in state being changed in order to mark an actor as malicious.
- me_again 4y agoThat seems "prohibitively convoluted" to me, if nothing else.
- birracerveza 4y agoBecause you don't have experience with it. There's nothing complicated about SIWE, minting an NFT and checking its validity, certainly not to describe it "prohibitively convoluted" aside from being scared of web3 keywords. Come on now. Not commenting on op's solution's validity or effectiveness, just replying to your comment.
- me_again 4y agoIf you rounded up 100 regular web users and ran a usability test where they had to do this to post a comment, how many do you think would succeed?
- birracerveza 4y agoA much higher percentage than 4 years ago, that's for sure
- G3rn0ti 4y agoThis whole minting and transaction issueing is done by a single (or two) mouse clicks if you use a browser plug-in like the MetaMask wallet.
- nneonneo 4y agoDo you mint one new NFT per site? Then you impose an excessive burden on users per new site they visit. Do you mint one NFT per address? If blocking only applies to the one site, a malicious operator can just spam the next site using that address - after all, they own tons of addresses and have many sites to spam, and they can surely spam for at least a bit before getting caught (per site and per address). If blocking is a public operation that gets you banned everywhere, well now one callous server owner can now disable your address’s ability to access anything. I fail to see how Web3 NFTs solve any of these problems…
- x-complexity 4y agoIn all honesty, there's limited tooling to resolve the botspam issue: There's nothing special about a human that a curated algorithm/botfarm can't sufficiently mimic. No technology is the panacea to this solution. The only way out is to increase the costs for bots to such an extent that it becomes costly for them to operate. The methodology for performing this is still up for debate, but tracking of some form will have to exist (be it publicly-collated or privately-monitored or some blend of both).
- riscy 4y ago> Mint a fixed-cost non-transferrable NFT to an address, with ownership limit of 1 per address. - Use SIWE (sign-in with Ethereum) to verify ownership of address & therefore NFT. - If malicious behaviour is detected, mark the NFT as belonging to a malicious actor at the server's end & block the account. - Require non-malicious-marked NFTs in order to use the site/app. In the real world that's called a paywall. Just requires users have an email address (wallet address) and proof of payment (NFT). Web3 contributes nothing but a different lingo for the existing concepts, yet has all of the same problems: nobody likes paywalls.