I was thinking this would involve farming the mining (the energy intensive part) out to clients. That basically just means they have to do sha hashes at some di

I was thinking this would involve farming the mining (the energy intensive part) out to clients. That basically just means they have to do sha hashes at some difficulty. The good thing is if you do 10 hashes at difficulty 5 you'd expect one to also pattern match difficulty 6, so I expect even low-difficulty hashing will eventually result in a block mine. Of course it isn't very secure because if the client sees a mined block they might have the technical savvy keep it. But you'd be forcing big web scrapers to run a horribly inefficient mining operation and they'd hate it. Plus you can run a blacklist of hated clients and double the difficulty for them, which is very low-cost for false positives and very high-cost for real scrapers - that isn't a result of using Bitcoin but it'd be funny.