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> I feel sorry for people with budget phones who now have to battle with these PoW systems and think LLM scrapers will win this one, with everyone else suffering a worse browsing experience.

I dunno. How much work do you really need in PoW systems to make the scrapers go after easier targets? My guess is not so much that you impair a human's UX. And if you do, then you have not fine-tuned your PoW algo, or you have very determined adversaries / scrapers.



Any PoW that doesn't impact end users is not going to impact LLM scrapers.


"Any" is a pretty mighty word to throw around.

As has been stated multiple times in this thread and basically any thread involving conversation on the topic, a PoW with a negligible cost (either of time/money/pain-in-the-ass factor) will not impact end users, but will affect LLM scrapers due to the scales involved.

The problem is trying to create a PoW that actually fits that model, is economical to implement, and can't easily be gamed.

But saying "any" seems to imply that it's a theoretical impossibility ("any machine that moves will encounter friction and lose energy to heat conversion, ergo perpetual motion machines are impossible"), when in fact it's a theoretical possibility, just not yet a practical reality.




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