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I think that requiring PoW (proof-of-work) could take over for simple requests, rejecting requests until a sufficient nonce is included in the request. Unfortun
by OutOfHere 1y ago
I think that requiring PoW (proof-of-work) could take over for simple requests, rejecting requests until a sufficient nonce is included in the request. Unfortunately, this collective PoW could burden power grids even more, wasting energy+money+computation for transmission. Such is life. It would be a lot better to just upgrade the servers, but that's never going to be sufficient.
- daedrdev 1y agowhat?
- GuB-42 1y agoWorse than that. Such computations are nothing to a desktop computer, or a server in a datacenter. But they are definitely going to be a problem for cheap smartphones. Ironically, the computers that are the best suited for solving these proof-of-work problem are the same kind of computers that are used to train and run AIs. And for even more irony, chatbots are relatively lightweight on the client side, being just text, while news sites tend to be bloated even without considering PoW. So there is a good chance for PoW not to affect AI scrapers much (they have powerful computers to solve the challenges) while driving away smartphone users towards chatbots and other AI-based summaries.
- OutOfHere 1y agoIf the PoW difficulty is IP or subnet specific, then the IP addresses or subnets that hammer the server more can be given increasingly greater PoW requirements. The smartphones, assuming they're not being used as proxies, will have few requests, so the server can go very easy on them with the PoW difficulty.