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> PoW increases the cost for the bots which is great. Trivial to implement, sure, but that added cost will add up quickly.

No, the article estimates it would cost less than a single penny to scrape all pages of 1,000,000 distinct Anubis-guarded websites for an entire month.

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Once you've built the system that lets you do that, maybe. You still have to do that, though, so it's still raising the cost floor.

but... how? when the author ran the numbers, the rough estimate is solving the challenges at a rate of 10000/5 min, on a single instance of the free tier of google compute. that is an insignificant load at an even more insignificant cost.

That's insanely slow compared to how fast they normally scrape.

As mentioned in the article, mining one token gets you unfettered access for 7 days.

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