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Comment by yomlica8 | Hacker News Reader

Any payment system will be used to track and unmask users. Then they'll double dip selling your even better identified user data to whoever wants it. Probably while still showing you ads.

You can slowdown bots with proof of work. A crypto-miner seems like the only possible payment method that would resist tracking, I think Brave tried something similar. Not sure I like that idea!

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I think “slowing down the bots with proof of work” is essentially what captchas were, back when they weee easy for us and hard for computers.

But now, when I see a captcha, I hit back, press unsubscribe, and find a new vendor. The work is harder for me than it is for a computer and so I won’t do it.

Accordingly, we can see that proof of work is the opposite of a solution.

Well... no. Proof of work doesn't mean you the human have to do work. Bitcoin is a proof of work system but you don't calculate the numbers by hand.

The question there is if an acceptable amount of work (e.g. cpu/gpu work) on a mobile phone is a large enough deterrent for a bot.

I’ve been rereading your post here and I think I’m coming around. Captcha is not proof that I did the work; it’s an inference that because I was able to do the work, it must have been easy for me (because I’m a human).

I let my my cryptoskepticism run a little too freely here. Thanks for making me think harder.

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