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can someone ELI5 how these proof-of-work captchas work under the hood to detect whether i'm a bot or not?
What does proof-of-work mean here and what makes it easy for humans and hard for bots?
Proof of work adds a very small cost to each individual request, increasing the cost of crawling to a number higher than X. Because actual humans make very few requests, we don’t notice the increase in cost.
So each spam message will take an extra second and 2 additional cents for electricity? I'm not sure what's the use case here.
So why does this make the user still click something?
What does proof-of-work mean here and what makes it easy for humans and hard for bots?
Think of crawlers: a crawler typically makes hundreds or thousands of requests per second. The owners of the crawler then sell this data for X$, or gain X$ profit. Proof of work adds a very small cost to each individual request, increasing the cost of crawling to a number higher than X. Because actual humans make very few requests, we don’t notice the increase in cost.
How did we end up with bitcoin before this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
The original Bitcoin paper even cited Hashcash as inspiration.
What does proof-of-work mean here and what makes it easy for humans and hard for bots?
Imagine scrapping thousands of page, but with a X>1 second wait for each. There wouldn't be a need to use such solution if crawlers were rate-limiting themselves, but they don't.
Why not make this contribute to something greater, like scientific grid computing, or a charitable bitcoin donation? Instead we're just burning a few watts to slow down crawlers.