Imagine the environmental impact of POW running on everyone's browser all the time globally just to use the internet. What is the point of having these gigawatt class hyperscale datacenters if we are still going to make clients run laps for every request?

Performance is the most important feature at some level. If an unauthenticated request from the public internet ties up your web server's CPU for more than a few hundred microseconds, you are eventually going to get screwed no matter how you slice it.

> Imagine the environmental impact of POW running on everyone's browser all the time globally just to use the internet.

Systems that use more electricity for no other reason than use more electricity and raise bills should be illegal imho, as that's what Anubis does and why it blows my mind people think PoW is a good idea.

Imagine you bought a TV and there was a device in the TV that did /nothing/ but just use more electricity to persuade agaisnt people having too many TVs in their house.

The real question here is whether there's a better solution for blocking scrapers and spammers thst clearly do not care about any of these things.

Writing fast software and using authentication when anonymous requests would be too expensive are excellent solutions.

Pretending like these solutions don't exist seems to be the central prerequisite for engaging in much of the related conversation space.

> Imagine the environmental impact of POW running on everyone's browser all the time globally just to use the internet.

Yeah, I'm imagining it and my imagination tells me it's trivial, especially next to the thick layer of web framework sludge people smear over everything.

Do you have an argument that involves a number?