Comment by tptacek
Comment by tptacek 2 days ago
This came up before (and this post links to the Tavis Ormandy post that kicked up the last firestorm about Anubis) and without myself shading the intent or the execution on Anubis, just from a CS perspective, I want to say again that the PoW thing Anubis uses doesn't make sense.
Work functions make sense in password hashes because they exploit an asymmetry: attackers will guess millions of invalid passwords for every validated guess, so the attacker bears most (really almost all) of the cost.
Work functions make sense in antispam systems for the same reason: spam "attacks" rely on the cost of an attempt being so low that it's efficient to target millions of victims in the expectation of just one hit.
Work functions make sense in Bitcoin because they function as a synchronization mechanism. There's nothing actually valorous about solving a SHA2 puzzle, but the puzzles give the whole protocol a clock.
Work functions don't make sense as a token tax; there's actually the opposite of the antispam asymmetry there. Every bot request to a web page yields tokens to the AI company. Legitimate users, who far outnumber the bots, are actually paying more of a cost.
None of this is to say that a serious anti-scraping firewall can't be built! I'm fond of pointing to how Youtube addressed this very similar problem, with a content protection system built in Javascript that was deliberately expensive to reverse engineer and which could surreptitiously probe the precise browser configuration a request to create a new Youtube account was using.
The next thing Anubis builds should be that, and when they do that, they should chuck the proof of work thing.
With all due respect, but almost all I see in this thread is people looking down their nose at a proven solution, and giving advice instead of doing the work. I can see how you are a _very important person_ with bills to pay and money to make, but at least have the humility of understanding that the solution we got is better than the solution that could be better if only there was someone else to think of it and build it.