Hacker News Reader

Comment by swinglock | Hacker News Reader

Proof of work can already be implemented without a token.

Tor has such a feature for denial of service protection.

https://blog.torproject.org/introducing-proof-of-work-defens...

A benefit of a token is you can recycle previous proof of work by using a small amount of Bitcoin, which could be transferred using Lightning. The value could also be transferred back some amount of time after registration given no bad behavior, allowing for larger sums than a cent, which could provide better protection.

View on HN

With a token, you probably get a higher efficiency. Similar to how a heatpump is more efficient than a heater.

If you only consume resources on the client side, then you hope that an attacker thinks "I won't invest $0.01 of resources just to log in here".

If you also transfer the consumed resources to the server, you get an additional benefit: The server thinks "$0.01 is enough to cover the costs of a fake signup".

And the second benefit is probably even better than the first. The server will never really know how cheaply attackers can access resources. But they probably know how much a fake signup costs them.

I think a fairer solution will be some form of proof of personhood that isn't PoW-based. Your idea isn't bad but it gives more power to those who can afford a lot of devices. You know those Chinese mobile phone click farms they use to game app stores? It will be like that, PoW can prevent spam only to a certain degree and with all the social media and networks we have today there is a lot of money in influencing the users. So spending a few million dollars on devices can be very profitable if it lets you boost certain messages.

But is it worth billions? You just need to increase the cost 1000 fold and pay it back after a holding period to implement that.

The drawback is it gets a lot more complex when using a token, because of the additional state, communication, costs and security.

A one shot proof of work can be very simple, but probably not effective enough, given that mobile users likely do not want to wait what may have to be many minutes and drain their battery.

Freezing a cent or a dollar for days seems like a better option. Might very well be that VISA/MasterCard figures this out before the crypto bros build anything usable. It will be far easier to do without decentralization and would also be great to spy on and control people.

>Freezing a cent or a dollar for days seems like a better option. Might very well be that VISA/MasterCard figures this out before the crypto bros build anything usable. It will be far easier to do without decentralization and would also be great to spy on and control people.

Fucking A HN.

For any Juniors using this site, this is exactly what you don't post. Especially if it's just to cathart cynicism. I assure you, Poe's law guarantees this will find it's way into some PM's or exec's mind somewhere.

Depends on the use case.

If the captcha is to prevent overuse of a free trial, then nobody will operate a lot of devices just to get more free trials if the paid version is cheaper than those devices.

If the use case is to improve democracy, then it gets more complicated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com