I hope lots of websites adopt this, mainly because I want to see more happy jackal girls while browsing.

My monetization strategy is unironically to offer a de-anime'd version under the name Techaro BotStopper or something.

It's a clever (and hilarious) strategy that will probably sell at least a few licenses. As an anime hater I'd be motivated by this.

Just change the pictures in cmd/anubis/static/img/ to whatever you prefer, I think.

Or, alternatively, you know, pay the author for the work they've done

Or, alternatively, just embrace anime-porn content spectrum. I mean, just compare platforms that are free of it and ones that are chock full, and see which ones die and which grows.

Sure, if you're going to deploy it on your company site, but I think if you're running a personal website and want to throttle LLM crawlers without falsely advertising that you're a furry, you could just go and modify this piece of MIT-licensed software.

Or you could pay for BotStopper and have RPM/DEB packages too.

That's kinda what the company Friendly Captcha does

Does the PoW make money via crypto mining? Or is it just to waste the caller's CPU cycles? If you could monetize the PoW then you could re-challenge at an interval tuned so that the caller pays for their usage.

It's to waste CPU cycles. I don't want to touch cryptocurrency with a 20 foot pole. I realize I'm leaving money on the table by doing this, but I don't want to alienate the kinds of communities I want to protect.

By doing PoW as a side effect of something you need to do anyway for other reason, you actually make mining less profitable for other miners, which is helping to eliminate waste.

This is an aspect that a lot of PoW haters miss. While PoW is a waste, there are long term economic incentives to minimize it to either being a side-effect of something actually useful, or using energy that would go to waste anyway, making it's overall effect gravitate toward neutral.

Unfortunately such a second order effects are hard to explain to most people.

I always felt like crypto is nothing but speculating on value with no other good uses, but there is a kind of motivation here.

Say a hash challenge gets widely adopted, and scraping becomes more costly, maybe even requires GPUs. This is great, you can declare victory.

But what if after a while the scraping companies, with more resources than real users, are better able to solve the hash?

Crypto appeals here because you could make the scrapers cover the cost of serving their page.

Ofc if you’re leery of crypto you could try to find something else for bots to do. xkcd 810 for example. Or folding at home or something. But something to make the bot traffic productive, because if it’s just a hardware capability check maybe the scrapers get better hardware than the real users. Or not, no clue idk

This feels like one of the few ways to potentially avoid what seems like the inevitability of attestation.

thank you for your contribution to society!