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Comment by kangalioo | Hacker News Reader

0.05 cents even. The beautiful thing is, minuscule amounts of micropayments are already enough to fix the incentives

Not sure it works, isn't it already like that if you have the cursed javascript-only pages? It's basically proof of work to access their content (and if you are scrapping en masse you likely also need some LLM getting involved)

I suppose the cost of hardware, network usage, and electricity is still under 0.05? I mean, we know the unit economics for LLMs don't make a ton of sense, except if enterprise customers really are what keeps the lights on.

With micropayments, the server owner makes 1 million requests times 0.05 cents = ~$500

The status quo with those js PoW pages doesn't really benefit the server owner at all, it's wasted energy.

I mean proof of work is always wasted energy, but I figure it's better to kill two birds with one stone.

CoinHive was one example of this. (I think this is a correct link? https://github.com/cazala/coin-hive). Although I think ideally you would want to have some sort of browser plugin or app that runs on bare metal instead of a proof-of-work in the browser, because RandomX is designed such that it's slow when implemented in JS (https://github.com/tevador/RandomX/blob/master/doc/design.md)

$500 would amount to just 10k requests. One million requests is $50k

10,000 requests times 0.05 cents (not dollars) = 500 cents = 5 dollars.

Problem is I'd rather have the 0.05cents go to however runs the website (the bugtracker in this case) than go to the electricity company.

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