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I am sorry if this question is dumb, but how does proof of work deter bots/scrappers from accessing a website?

I imagine it costs more resource to access the protected website but would this stop the bots? Wouldn't they be able to pass the challenge and scrap the data after? Or normal scrapbots usually timeout after a small amount of time/ resources is used?

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There are a few ways in which bots can fail to get past such challenges, but the most durable one (ie. the one that you cannot work around by changing the scraper code) is that it simply makes it much more expensive to make a request.

Like spam, this kind of mass-scraping only works because the cost of sending/requesting is virtually zero. Any cost is going to be a massive increase compared to 'virtually zero', at the kind of scale they operate at, even if it would be small to a normal user.

Put simply, most bots just aren't designed to solve such challenges.

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