[whoopdedo]

This has become a concern for the Arch Linux wiki which now makes you pass a proof-of-work challenge to read it. Which my anti-fingerprinting browser fails at every time. Putting a burden on human readers that will be only a minor temporary annoyance for the bots. Think about it, the T in CAPTCHA stands for "Turing". What is the design goal of AI? To create machines that can pass a Turing test.

I fear the end state of this game is the death of the anonymous internet.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

The point of (correctly done) proof-of-work is not to require Turing-level impersonation. It is to create a cost to a trawler that is going to hit thousands or more of your pages, and almost no cost to a human user.

Problem is, as you've discovered, it can have the cost that anti-fingerprinting browsers can't do the required work.

[whoopdedo]

These are AI bots. Computational capacity is not a limiting factor. I'd argue that my desktop consumer PC is less capable of efficiently solving a PoW than a multi-GPU cluster in a data center.

Even if, as you say, crawlers will hit the PoW thousands of times more, the only way to make it a barrier is if the cost is higher than the profit to be gained. Otherwise it's merely an expense to be passed on to the customer.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Anubis accomplishes this, AFAIU.