[zeropointsh]

How about using on-chain proof-of-work? It flips the script.

If a bot wants access, let it earn it—and let that work be captured, not discarded. Each request becomes compensation to the site itself. The crawler feeds the very system it scrapes. Its computational effort directly funds the site owner's wallet, joining the pool to complete its proof.

The cost becomes the contract.

[viraptor]

The check has to apply to people and bot visitors the same. If you're expecting a blockchain registered spend before the content is visible, basically nobody will visit your website.

[apetresc]

I don’t think OP meant you pay directly, just that you volunteer to do some part of the PoW (of some chain designed for this purpose) on behalf of the site, to its credit.

That’s not much of a different ask from Anubis. It just commandeers the compute for some useful purpose.

[xena]

If you can tell me how to implement protein folding without having to have gigabytes of scientific data involved, I'll implement it today.

[zeropointsh]

You could go viral[1] for implementing a Monero Miner[2][3] in Anubis. The check no longer denies someone; it lets EVERYONE in once they've paid the price (mining). This now makes false positives impossible, solving a lot of problems[4]. [1] https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-website-runs-a-crypt... [2] https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/anubis.html [Where they bring up CoinHive and JSEcoin]. [3] https://github.com/JSEcoin/website [4] https://anubis.techaro.lol/blog/2025/cpu-core-odd/

[interloxia]

Have a look at folding@home. Client and data could be less than 10mb.

https://foldingathome.org/

[delusional]

Making a proof of work algorithm do some actually useful work is very much an unsolved problem.

[apetresc]

I don’t necessarily mean “useful” in the sense of scientific research or something. Simply transferring value to the creators of the resource being accessed (a la a blockchain) instead of doing throwaway work would be an improvement.

[zeropointsh]

Exactly, instead of trying to totally prevent the bots/AI scrapers, make them "pay you" in compute to access and scrape. It needs to be solved.

[zeropointsh]

It would be more like using a javascript webminer to mine for you a bit before you get access. This would be the "proof-of-work" needed to then proceed to scrape.

[mzajc]

The last thing I want on the web is the normalization of cryptominers.

[Aachen]

Then again, if you're doing a useless computation one way or another, it might as well benefit the website whose content you're requesting

But in principle I very much agree

[akoboldfrying]

Which blockchain? An existing mainstream one like Bitcoin?

Because if so, I don't yet see how to "smooth out" the wins. If the crawler manages to solve the very-high-difficulty puzzle for you and get you 1BTC, great, but it will be a long time between wins.

If you're proposing a new (or non-mainstream) blockchain: What makes those coins valuable?

[recursivecaveat]

Isn't it the same problem as public mining pools? I remember I ran my little desktop in one for a day or 2 and got paid some micro-coins despite not personally winning a block. I'm not sure how they verify work and prevent cheating, but they appear to do so. I don't know if it scales down to a small enough size to be appropriate for 1 webpage though.

[akoboldfrying]

I think you're right, I'll look into this. Thanks!

[zeropointsh]

Look into JavaScript web miners for Monero. It exists but just hasn't been implemented into a proof-of-work concept to make a bot/AI scraper "pay" to access your site. Or if it has been used, not at scale.