3 ms·
> Even if your server is not vastly more powerful, your 1 second of proof-of-work means a single server can pass your challenge 3600 times an hour. A decentral
by runeks 3y ago
> Even if your server is not vastly more powerful, your 1 second of proof-of-work means a single server can pass your challenge 3600 times an hour.
A decentralized CAPTCHA that reduces an attacker to one request per second is a lot better than nothing! Why are you dismissing this as useless?
At the end of the day, all CAPTCHAs can be circumvented by paying humans to solve them. So all CAPTCHAs have a price, and in this case it’s the price of the power used by the CPU as well as renting the CPU (or the depreciation on a CPU you own).
- remram 3y agoBut it does not. It reduces it to 1 request per second, at least, per core, per machine that the attacker control. A single attacker can still send millions of requests per hour at very low cost, limited only by compute resources, which is what CAPTCHA is supposed to work around (by challenging the human not the machine). Downthread, emurlin has done the calculation for the actual cost of the deterrent and how bad it is compared to CAPTCHA: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37056504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37056504