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Surprised there hasn't been a fork of Anubis that changes the artificial PoW into a simple Monero mining PoW yet. Would be hilarious to trap scraper bots into

Surprised there hasn't been a fork of Anubis that changes the artificial PoW into a simple Monero mining PoW yet. Would be hilarious to trap scraper bots into endless labyrinths of LLM-generated mediawiki pages, getting them to mine hashes with each progressive article. At least then we would be making money off these rude bots.

g-b-r 1y ago
It would be a much bigger incentive to add them with little care for the innocents impacted. Although admittedly millions of sites already ruined themselves with cloudflare without that incentive
xnorswap 1y ago
The bots could check if they've hit the jackpot themselves and keep the valid hashes for themselves and only return when they're worthless. Then it's the bots who are making money from work they need to do for the captchas.
- forty 1y ago
  We need an oblivious crypto currency mining algorithm ^^
- nssnsjsjsjs 1y ago
  1. The problem is the bot needs to understand the program it is running to do that. Akin to the halting problem. 2. There is no money in mining on the kinda hardware scrapers will run on. Power costs more that they'd earn.
  - immibis 1y ago
    Realistically, the bot owner could notice you're running MoneroAnubis and then would specifically check for MoneroAnubis, for example with a file hash, or a comment saying /* MoneroAnubis 1.0 copyright blah blah GPL license blah */. The bot wouldn't be expected to somehow determine this by itself automatically. Also, the ideal Monero miner is a power-efficient CPU (so probably in-order). There are no Monero ASICs by design.
    - nssnsjsjsjs 1y ago
      I doubt you could do this efficiently enough such that an mining-business optimised mining rig can be kept busy enough with web-scraped honey pots to be worth the think time of setting it up vs. just scrape and skip pow protected sites + dedicated crypto mining operation as 2 seperate things.
- gus_massa 1y ago
  IIRC the mined block has an instruction like fake quote > Please add the reward and fees to: 187e6128f96thep00laddr3s9827a4c629b8723d07809 And if you make a fake block that changes the address, then the fake block is not a good one. This avoid the same problem with people stealing from pools, and also evil people listening to new mined blocks that pretend that they found it and send a fake one.
- hypeatei 1y ago
  > Then it's the bots who are making money from work they need to do for the captchas. Wouldn't it be easier to mine crypto themselves at that point? Seems like a very roundabout way to go about mining crypto.
albrewer 1y ago
There a company awhile back that did almost exactly this called CoinHive
kmeisthax 1y ago
This is a good idea for honeypotting scrapers, though as per [0] I hope nobody actually tries to use it on a real website anyone would want to use. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44117591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44117591

g-b-r 1y ago

It would be a much bigger incentive to add them with little care for the innocents impacted. Although admittedly millions of sites already ruined themselves with cloudflare without that incentive

xnorswap 1y ago

The bots could check if they've hit the jackpot themselves and keep the valid hashes for themselves and only return when they're worthless. Then it's the bots who are making money from work they need to do for the captchas.

forty 1y ago
We need an oblivious crypto currency mining algorithm ^^
nssnsjsjsjs 1y ago
1. The problem is the bot needs to understand the program it is running to do that. Akin to the halting problem. 2. There is no money in mining on the kinda hardware scrapers will run on. Power costs more that they'd earn.
- immibis 1y ago
  Realistically, the bot owner could notice you're running MoneroAnubis and then would specifically check for MoneroAnubis, for example with a file hash, or a comment saying /* MoneroAnubis 1.0 copyright blah blah GPL license blah */. The bot wouldn't be expected to somehow determine this by itself automatically. Also, the ideal Monero miner is a power-efficient CPU (so probably in-order). There are no Monero ASICs by design.
  - nssnsjsjsjs 1y ago
    I doubt you could do this efficiently enough such that an mining-business optimised mining rig can be kept busy enough with web-scraped honey pots to be worth the think time of setting it up vs. just scrape and skip pow protected sites + dedicated crypto mining operation as 2 seperate things.
gus_massa 1y ago
IIRC the mined block has an instruction like fake quote > Please add the reward and fees to: 187e6128f96thep00laddr3s9827a4c629b8723d07809 And if you make a fake block that changes the address, then the fake block is not a good one. This avoid the same problem with people stealing from pools, and also evil people listening to new mined blocks that pretend that they found it and send a fake one.
hypeatei 1y ago
> Then it's the bots who are making money from work they need to do for the captchas. Wouldn't it be easier to mine crypto themselves at that point? Seems like a very roundabout way to go about mining crypto.

albrewer 1y ago

There a company awhile back that did almost exactly this called CoinHive

kmeisthax 1y ago

This is a good idea for honeypotting scrapers, though as per [0] I hope nobody actually tries to use it on a real website anyone would want to use. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44117591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44117591