Hacker News Reader

Comment by DaSHacka | Hacker News Reader

Surprised there hasn't been a fork of Anubis that changes the artificial PoW into a simple Monero mining PoW yet.

Would be hilarious to trap scraper bots into endless labyrinths of LLM-generated mediawiki pages, getting them to mine hashes with each progressive article.

At least then we would be making money off these rude bots.

View on HN

It would be a much bigger incentive to add them with little care for the innocents impacted.

Although admittedly millions of sites already ruined themselves with cloudflare without that incentive

There a company awhile back that did almost exactly this called CoinHive

The bots could check if they've hit the jackpot themselves and keep the valid hashes for themselves and only return when they're worthless.

Then it's the bots who are making money from work they need to do for the captchas.

We need an oblivious crypto currency mining algorithm ^^

1. The problem is the bot needs to understand the program it is running to do that. Akin to the halting problem.

2. There is no money in mining on the kinda hardware scrapers will run on. Power costs more that they'd earn.

Realistically, the bot owner could notice you're running MoneroAnubis and then would specifically check for MoneroAnubis, for example with a file hash, or a comment saying /* MoneroAnubis 1.0 copyright blah blah GPL license blah */. The bot wouldn't be expected to somehow determine this by itself automatically.

Also, the ideal Monero miner is a power-efficient CPU (so probably in-order). There are no Monero ASICs by design.

I doubt you could do this efficiently enough such that an mining-business optimised mining rig can be kept busy enough with web-scraped honey pots to be worth the think time of setting it up vs. just scrape and skip pow protected sites + dedicated crypto mining operation as 2 seperate things.

IIRC the mined block has an instruction like

fake quote > Please add the reward and fees to: 187e6128f96thep00laddr3s9827a4c629b8723d07809

And if you make a fake block that changes the address, then the fake block is not a good one.

This avoid the same problem with people stealing from pools, and also evil people listening to new mined blocks that pretend that they found it and send a fake one.

> Then it's the bots who are making money from work they need to do for the captchas.

Wouldn't it be easier to mine crypto themselves at that point? Seems like a very roundabout way to go about mining crypto.

This is a good idea for honeypotting scrapers, though as per [0] I hope nobody actually tries to use it on a real website anyone would want to use.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44117591

Reply on news.ycombinator.com