Reposting a similar point I made recently about CAPTCHA and scalpers, but it’s even more relevant for scrapers.

PoW can help against basic scrapers or DDoS, but it won’t stop anyone serious. Last week I looked into a Binance CAPTCHA solver that didn’t use a browser at all, just a plain HTTP client. https://blog.castle.io/what-a-binance-captcha-solver-tells-u...

The attacker had fully reverse engineered the signal collection and solved-state flow, including obfuscated parts. They could forge all the expected telemetry.

This kind of setup is pretty standard in bot-heavy environments like ticketing or sneaker drops. Scrapers often do the same to cut costs. CAPTCHA and PoW mostly become signal collection protocols, if those signals aren’t tightly coupled to the actual runtime, they get spoofed.

And regarding PoW: if you try to make it slow enough to hurt bots, you also hurt users on low-end devices. Someone even ported PerimeterX’s PoW to CUDA to accelerate solving: https://github.com/re-jevi/PerimiterXCudaSolver/blob/main/po...