PoW rate limiting actually pre-dates PoW cryptocurrency, the former has just had a resurgence recently in response to AI scrapers pissing in everyone's pools.

PoW rate limiting actually pre-dates PoW cryptocurrency, the former has just had a resurgence recently in response to AI scrapers pissing in everyone's pools. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash The original Bitcoin paper even cited Hashcash as inspiration.