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Crypto currency mining could be the solution. If one request to the site generates more revenue than it costs in resources, the bot problem is solved. The aut

by TekMol 4y ago

Crypto currency mining could be the solution. If one request to the site generates more revenue than it costs in resources, the bot problem is solved. The author says that he is getting 15 bot requests to his site per second. That is about 36 million requests per month. How much does it cost to serve those? $1000 would seem high. $1000/36M = $0.00003 per request. How long would a crypto currency, that is suitable for mining in the browser, need to be mined before $0.00003 is generated? If it turnes out it is a few seconds or so, the solution would be nicely user friendly. A few seconds of CPU time for access to the site. No ads needed to finance the site. It is kind of telling, that Bitcoin started as a spam blocker. The original "hashcash" use case was to use proof of work to prevent email spam.

GeckoEidechse 4y ago
As much as I hate the whole cryptocurrency hype myself, I think I agree that a proof-of-work requirement on spam detection that pays in the hosts favour could help solve spam to some degree.
- endgame 4y ago
  Before bitcoin, there was hashcash, which aimed to do exactly this: http://www.hashcash.org/ http://www.hashcash.org/ . The original bitcoin paper cites it, in fact.
kragen 4y ago
Satoshi Nakamoto almost certainly isn't Adam Back. It might be enough for the request to require more resources from the requestor than from the server, even if it doesn't actually give the server any money. I mean the requestor probably isn't going to be willing to dedicate more hardware "horsepower" to taking your search engine down than you are to keeping it up. That was the idea behind Hashcash. As for coins, the current Bitcoin hashrate is about 200 exahashes per second, down from a high of over 250 a couple of months ago, and the block reward is 6.25 BTC until probably June 02024. At a price of US$24000/BTC that's US$150k per block (plus a much smaller amount in transaction fees) or about US$1.25e-18 per hash. So your suggestion of US$3e-5 would require about 2e13 hashes. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Non-specialized_hardware_comparison#AMD_.28ATI.29 https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Non-specialized_hardware_comparis... says an overclocked ATI Radeon HD 6990 can do about 800 megahashes per second (8e8) so you're looking at about 3e4 seconds of compute on that card, about 8 hours. Maybe one of the altcoins that uses a hash function with a smaller ASIC speedup would be a better fit, although I don't know enough about mining to know if there are any where GPUs are still competitive. Still, it seems like it might be more than a few seconds?
- TekMol 4y ago
  I have not seen any arguments yet, why Satoshi is not Adam. I did say "crypto currency, that is suitable for mining in the browser" for exactly this reason: That Bitcoin is not well suited for it. One would have to look at what typical consumer hardware is good at. Maybe an algorithm that saturates one CPU core with serial calculations that need fast access to exactly 1GB of RAM. I think consumer hardware is pretty good when it comes to single core performance and RAM access.
  - swinglock 4y ago
    You'd only need lightning integration and paying a small amount of sats, recycling the Bitcoin proof of work instead of making more. You could even have the server transfer the same sats back and forth as a token as long as the server side is happy.
    - TekMol 4y ago
      "only" You will not get your visitors to buy Bitcoin and set up a lighnign wallet to visit your website. But having some JS on your site that crunches numbers for 2 seconds before the user can progress would work.
      - swinglock 4y ago
        Well it would "just" have to be integrated in browsers. :) You don't have to buy it, you could crunch numbers for an equivalent cost if that's preferable. The advantage is that the effort can be stored and used later, so you need not even add a 2 second latency. Similar to "Privacy Pass".

by TekMol 4y ago

GeckoEidechse 4y ago

As much as I hate the whole cryptocurrency hype myself, I think I agree that a proof-of-work requirement on spam detection that pays in the hosts favour could help solve spam to some degree.

endgame 4y ago
Before bitcoin, there was hashcash, which aimed to do exactly this: http://www.hashcash.org/ http://www.hashcash.org/ . The original bitcoin paper cites it, in fact.

kragen 4y ago

Satoshi Nakamoto almost certainly isn't Adam Back. It might be enough for the request to require more resources from the requestor than from the server, even if it doesn't actually give the server any money. I mean the requestor probably isn't going to be willing to dedicate more hardware "horsepower" to taking your search engine down than you are to keeping it up. That was the idea behind Hashcash. As for coins, the current Bitcoin hashrate is about 200 exahashes per second, down from a high of over 250 a couple of months ago, and the block reward is 6.25 BTC until probably June 02024. At a price of US$24000/BTC that's US$150k per block (plus a much smaller amount in transaction fees) or about US$1.25e-18 per hash. So your suggestion of US$3e-5 would require about 2e13 hashes. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Non-specialized_hardware_comparison#AMD_.28ATI.29 https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Non-specialized_hardware_comparis... says an overclocked ATI Radeon HD 6990 can do about 800 megahashes per second (8e8) so you're looking at about 3e4 seconds of compute on that card, about 8 hours. Maybe one of the altcoins that uses a hash function with a smaller ASIC speedup would be a better fit, although I don't know enough about mining to know if there are any where GPUs are still competitive. Still, it seems like it might be more than a few seconds?

TekMol 4y ago
I have not seen any arguments yet, why Satoshi is not Adam. I did say "crypto currency, that is suitable for mining in the browser" for exactly this reason: That Bitcoin is not well suited for it. One would have to look at what typical consumer hardware is good at. Maybe an algorithm that saturates one CPU core with serial calculations that need fast access to exactly 1GB of RAM. I think consumer hardware is pretty good when it comes to single core performance and RAM access.
- swinglock 4y ago
  You'd only need lightning integration and paying a small amount of sats, recycling the Bitcoin proof of work instead of making more. You could even have the server transfer the same sats back and forth as a token as long as the server side is happy.
  - TekMol 4y ago
    "only" You will not get your visitors to buy Bitcoin and set up a lighnign wallet to visit your website. But having some JS on your site that crunches numbers for 2 seconds before the user can progress would work.
    - swinglock 4y ago
      Well it would "just" have to be integrated in browsers. :) You don't have to buy it, you could crunch numbers for an equivalent cost if that's preferable. The advantage is that the effort can be stored and used later, so you need not even add a 2 second latency. Similar to "Privacy Pass".