Why not make this contribute to something greater, like scientific grid computing, or a charitable bitcoin donation? Instead we're just burning a few watts to slow down crawlers.
Because the overhead of orchestrating and distributing the problem would be much larger than the amount of work you can do in 1 second?
Do you have an example of scientific grid computing that is expensive to compute but cheap to verify? Those are the properties this needs.
I like the citizen science idea, the bitcoin one is so shitty. There was an epedemic of websites covertly mining in browsers a while back and this is a dangerous road to go down.
The entire purpose of this library is to covertly mine in browsers
Only for the protection of the service. With a financial incentive all of the sudden it’s deployed unnecessarily to every static site in existence, just like ads all those years ago. And the enshittificstion continues.