[anonym29]

You raise some good points here, but PoW is meant to be one tool in the toolbox, not the only line of defense. You can still maintain blocklists of known scrapers (or better yet, have your PoW system be aware of them and silently adjust the difficulty to an impossible level, such that the scraper gets stuck trying to solve your PoW challenge until it hits a timeout configured by the scraper, if they were wise enough to configure one). It's also courteous to not only build and maintain your own blocklists, but to share them with e.g. vtotal and spamhaus, to help protect others.

Similarly, you have tarpits, which generate infinite mazes of garbage data, or even deliberately poisoning training data (should the scrapers be training LLMs) though this don't entirely eliminate the deleterious effects of scraping on the host's web server (more info: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/ai-haters-build-...).

If the premise was evaluating whether or not PoW would be a magic silver bullet that stops scrapers all by itself, then you are correct, it does not stop all scrapers. Scraping and anti-scraping is fundamentally a constantly evolving cat and mouse game that demands adaptability and punishes complacency from all participants trying not to lose.