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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

I don't see anyone here mentioning this, so I will. CloudFlare supports PrivacyPass, a third-party, privacy-preserving way to do proof-of-work for websites. Basically, you do some small amount of CPU work and get 30 tickets your browser can transparently redeem for access to a site.

That's a pretty clever way to both deter bad actors and ensure legitimate users get uninterrupted access to websites.

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AFAIK the Privacy Pass protocol has nothing to do with proof-of-work. It's just a way to allow users to solve a CAPTCHA once and re-use that single solution across multiple sites without jeopardizing privacy. Reduces the number of CAPTCHAs you see, but doesn't eliminate them entirely.

What you're talking about is more like what Hashcash does, where it essentially replaces CAPTCHAs with a cryptocurrency miner, such that bots become more expensive to run due to the amount of energy they consume. The downside is it's not great for battery life for regular users either.

Sorry, you're right, I misremembered. You solve the CAPTCHA to get tickets, you don't do work.

Captcha is also a kind of proof-of-work, and a very nasty one, where users are made to do the work instead of computers.

I probably don't understand PrivacyPass well enough, but I don't really see how it's a good solution to the problem.

It makes it so you solve thirty times fewer CAPTCHAs, which is not nothing.

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