Not if the honest party is doing it in a browser: The same computer can so any POW so much faster in C than any amount jf JS and WASM that it will never ever ever be a contest.
> becoming much more obvious and easy to block, or they have to use massive amounts of compute.
If you believe this, please contact me: I think compute is free[1] and can probably help you out.
Well they don't.
Users want the website to work sooner, and care little about whether a for-loop of elements take 10ms or 20ms if it only happens once.
JS can be AOT compiled if you can wait a few _seconds_ -- which users don't want, so browsers don't bother.
Our attacker however, rightly observes they only have to pay that compilation cost once.
Browsers _intentionally_ limit the amount of memory and cpu cycles a tab can consume to make for a nicer human experience.