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I wonder if relying on cryptography instead of obfuscation would be a better solution to fight shoe-buying bots? E.g. couldn't proof of work be used in order t

I wonder if relying on cryptography instead of obfuscation would be a better solution to fight shoe-buying bots? E.g. couldn't proof of work be used in order to complete the purchase process? If it works for bitcoin on large scale it ought to work for a purchase form in small scale without all the distributed systems gotchas. E.g. Nike could simply increase the difficulty whenever they see fit to tweak the amount of bots succesfully purchasing things.

grogenaut 4y ago
Nike already does this. Checkout kasada. https://www.kasada.io/sneaker-bots-evolution-ecosystem/ https://www.kasada.io/sneaker-bots-evolution-ecosystem/
worewood 4y ago
Youtube does use proof of work to protect against bots. Not really effective, youtube-dl for example just runs the scripts in order to generate the proofs required.
- gruez 4y ago
  AFAIK those scripts are more to prove that the client has a functioning javascript environment rather than proving that they can compute 5s of computation or whatever.
- arcbyte 4y ago
  It protects against mass bots but not individual user agent bots which I think is desirable.
saagarjha 4y ago
There's a hard tradeoff here between how long a user on a low-end device is willing to wait to purchase something and how quickly a bot with powerful hardware can go through your proof of work.
- arianvanp 4y ago
  People are sleeping in tents in front of the Nike store to get sneakers. So I think the hard limit is pretty high for this specific sneaker niche