[netik]

So this is a basically a shill advertisement ending in "Your AI Agents can avoid captchas if you pay us."

The last example is a false narrative, that captchas will only happen if the "browser looks suspicious". Systems like Altcha put an end to this argument. They don't care if the browser looks suspicious, only that the browser can perform a proof-of-work to get past a captcha designed to slow down the request rate.

When applied consistently, it will effectively block and slow down AI crawlers, which is what this company wants to promote.

[chrismorgan]

Proof-of-work is bad rate limiting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44093918. The playing field is wildly unbalanced. Even naive attackers tend to have a lot more computing power available than a lot of your normal users, and where it’s SHA-256 (which is almost the worst choice imaginable for a proof of work scheme, yet which every single service that I know of has used), an intelligent attacker goes from being hundreds of times as powerful to millions of times as powerful.

[peeet]

More advanced and targeted bots can "bypass" Proof of work as well though, e.g. using something like https://github.com/toman-tom/Incapsula-PoW

[gruez]

>Systems like Altcha put an end to this argument. They don't care if the browser looks suspicious, only that the browser can perform a proof-of-work to get past a captcha designed to slow down the request rate.

That doesn't really work out in reality because bots are happy to wait 5 seconds or even 5 minutes for a PoW challenge to complete. Humans on the other hand will not, especially if they're on a mobile device with limited compute and energy.