alt Hacker News>We have not gone with tools like Anubis, partly because it causes annoying delays for those trying to get to the site, but also partly because it seems inevitable that the scrapers will eventually find their way around it. Indeed, there are some indications that is already happening. A proof-of-work requirement is not a huge obstacle when you have millions of other people's machines to do the work on.
The first argument that it introduces delays to users is solid, but I would advise reconsidering on the second one that a PoW workaround will be found. The moment it does you'll be able to tell because Bitcoin will crash to 0.
Will bots use infected computers to do compute to work around it? Maybe, but it requires a CPU in addition to a network reputation, 2 mechanisms are stronger than one.
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Residential proxy users don't have the ability to run compute on their proxies.
> The moment it does you'll be able to tell because Bitcoin will crash to 0.
The "workaround" for PoW is running the PoW computation on hardware that's better suited for the task. Bitcoin mining has been using ASIC for many years now.
Let's say a legitimate user is willing to wait for one minute on a budget phone. Then your PoW is limited to what that phone can compute in one minute. But on the attacker's specialized hardware this computation only costs fractions of a penny, so they are barely hindered by it.
The SHA256 based PoW scheme has a very heavy ASIC advantage. People have tried to design PoW scheme that minimize the custom hardware advantage, but I'm not sure if they managed to close the gap far enough to make PoW feasible for this application.