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Comment by marklar423 | Hacker News Reader

I'm assuming a bot running a headless browser instance can still get past it?

It's still valuable to raise the cost of scraping of course. I don't think anything can really stop a determined scraper from impersonating a human. I wonder though if a system similar to Anubis but mining some crypto would make bots _welcome_ - since they're paying for their traffic.

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People tried this in 2013 or so, there's no point to it. Doing proof of work in javascript in a browser is so crushingly, pointlessly slow that there's no value at all. Some browsers also intentionally detect attempts to do proof of work and attempt to block it entirely.

> Some browsers also intentionally detect attempts to do proof of work and attempt to block it entirely.

Then they'd be blocking themselves from the website.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/block-cryptominers-with-...

    To help you combat these unwelcome scripts, we’ve partnered with Disconnect and compiled lists of domains that serve cryptomining scripts so you can block them directly through Firefox. When you download Firefox,  tracking protection is enabled by default, blocking known cryptominers.

Technically true, but the list is mostly nonfunctional - cryptominers are basically extinct in the wild, and most of the domains on the list have expired or no longer serve mining scripts.

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