To be clear, I am not minimizing the problems of scrapers. I am merely pointing out that this strategy of proof-of-work has nasty side effects and we need something better.

These issues are not short term. PoW means you are entering into an arms race against an adversary with bottomless pockets that inherently requires a ton of useless computations in the browser.

When it comes to moving towards something based on heuristics, which is what the developer was talking about there, that is much better. But that is basically what many others are already doing (like the “I am not a robot” checkmark) and fundamentally different from the PoW that I argue against.

Go do heuristics, not PoW.

I get that website admins are desperate for a solution, but Anubis is fundamentally flawed.

It is hostile to the user, because it is very slow on older hardware andere forces you to use javascript.

It is bad for the environment, because it wastes energy on useless computations similar to mining crypto. If more websites start using this, that really adds up.

But most importantly, it won’t work in the end. These scraping tech companies have much deeper pockets and can use specialized hardware that is much more efficient at solving these challenges than a normal web browser.