[KolmogorovComp]

I’m still surprised by Anubis’ decision not to make the PoW have a useful output, for example a crypto, protein-folding like, or something else.

And I speak as being generally very critical of cryptos, but here rewarding the website owner with some cents to have access seems fair, and resolves the traditional issues about micro-payments.

[frollogaston]

I'm not even convinced that this works well for users who want to run that work on their machines. Distributed cluster of random untrusted hardware has got to be so much less efficient than a purpose-designed datacenter cluster, and harder to manage. I get that any "free" compute is cheaper than paid compute, but at some point the gap is so wide that the coordination alone doesn't make sense.

Wasn't there some famous home-computing project that recently stopped because of that? I thought it was Folding@home but that seems to still be going.

[xena]

Patches welcome. I'd love to do protein folding too.

[omoikane]

I would think twice before adding those type of features to Anubis. I like how Anubis currently does one thing and do that well. Once you make a captcha-like service that also does useful work, users will eventually perceive it as a useful-work-service that happens to have captcha-like function on the side, and that new perception will get a lot more people upset about Anubis.

We see this with Recaptcha where when it was first launched, some news sites praised it as making good use of what would have otherwise been wasted human effort. But eventually I started to see negative comments along the lines of how Recaptcha is just extracting free work to train self driving cars, nevermind the part about stopping bots. Since Recaptcha is now sometimes non-interactive, I am not sure if that data is still used for training, other than to improve Recaptcha itself, but the negative sentiment still holds whether that data is used or not.

[zadikian]

I agree, also making it do useful work could detract from how well it works as bot-prevention. Recaptcha suffered from its own success eventually, having to ask people to read nearly impossible things, and now many sites are instead asking me to solve puzzles with no practical use.

P.S. Great to see you, omoikane

[xena]

The last time I evaluated doing protein folding it required gigabytes of disk-data to make it happen. If there's a way to do it without needing gigabytes of disk-data, I'm at least interested in hearing it out.

[YoshiRulz]

The original reCAPTCHA which was used to train OCR came out back when Google was at least pretending to not be evil, hence the favourable coverage about old books. Now that the challenges are used to train Waymo cars (citation needed, but obviously they won't be sharing the data), and Google is definitely not tracking everyone with it (according to... Google, the adtech company), there's no positive spin you could possibly put on it.

Were Anubis to add crypto mining, even if all the revenue went to Techaro, you could still say "the enshittification is a shame, but at least they're not Google". Using the compute for BOINC protein folding somehow should be unobjectionable.

[KolmogorovComp]

what about something (crypto being the only idea I have) that could be leveraged to reward the website owner?

[xena]

Anubis is not a cryptocurrency miner: https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/user/frequently-asked-questi...

[KolmogorovComp]

it does not answer if it's a conscious design choice or just a technical limitation of the PoW, or just a "patch welcome" issue.

[xena]

It's a conscious design choice. Doing that gets you considered a botnet/malware. I don't want Anubis to be considered a botnet/malware.

[ssl-3]

I already consider Anubis to be malware and I'm just some dude who likes to play with computers.

If it mined crypto instead of just burn clock cycles, then that could not in any way serve to lower its ranking in my book. It's already at minimum.

[KolmogorovComp]

OK, I don't think it would be the case if it was one of many algorithms offered by Anubis, especially if it's enabled by the webmaster.

That being said I don't know any crypto that would technically fit as a lightweight PoW.