[geysersam]

8 billion checks per day sounds on the low end. I can imagine it being ten or hundred times more. That still seem pretty fine though. On the other hand, it's hard to see that such a modest energy cost would dissuade any attacks.

[petu]

> I can imagine it being ten or hundred times more

I don't think I average even 2 captchas a day being terminally online, so 10 across every soul in the world sounds way too much for me. (we're ignoring bots it's meant to deter?)

> it's hard to see that such a modest energy cost would dissuade any attacks.

It's not against targeted attacks, but scrapping.

And not about energy cost, but available compute power -- it requires scrapper to use browser with JS (or time commitment to reimplement PoW outside of JS), limits their request rate by CPU core count.

[HumanOstrich]

> I don't think I average even 2 captchas a day being terminally online, so 10 across every soul in the world sounds way too much for me. (we're ignoring bots it's meant to deter?)

You're mixing up checks, fingerprinting, and PoW with a captcha being triggered because those didn't pass. The less abnormal your setup is, the fewer captchas you'll get.

I agree with the rest of what you said.

Also I think you mean "scraper" and not "scrapper".