Im not a crypto person, but I was intrigued by Chia. They generate their coins based on allocating disk space. So if you have a bit of free space, you can fill it with plots and play the lotto.

The intriguing part is that I think it works against scaling. The incremental cost for me to use the 500GB of free space on my disk is $0, but someone scaling a bot farm has to buy all their space.

Real people tend to have a lot more idle capacity than optimized, scaled businesses, so any kind of proof of idle capacity seems like it would disadvantage bot farms.

I’ve also thought that proof of collateral spending would be a good system. For example, you buy groceries and the store gives you a token saying you spent $X of real world money. Those tokens help show you're not a bot. Keeping that system honest and equitable would be extremely difficult though.

Maybe schools could give kids tokens for attendance. It sounds kind of dumb, but who knows.