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You may want to consider running some proof-of-work in the browser, that would be costly to run for bots.

That's not a bad idea.

I'd be concerned about being accused of/blocked for crypto-jacking. That said, I'd like to see a proof-of-work based captcha that donates any earnings to charity as cryptocurrency.

I came across hashcash.io before, previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7944540

Alternatively I could write something dead simple from scratch that looks for sha collisions to burn a few cycles. Would this be less dubious?

All that does is further penalize the victims of botnets by driving up their electricity bills. It won't hurt the spammers who run the botnets.

This is only true if we assume that spammers are not already saturating the resources of their victims. And even then, it's better than penalizing blind or deaf people.

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