𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍

Yeah, tarpits. Or, even just intentionally fractionally lagging the connection, or putting a delay on the response to some mime types. Delays don’t consume nearly as much processing as PoW. Personally, I like tar pits that trickle out content like a really slow server. Hidden URLs that users are not likely to click on. These are about the least energy-demanding solutions that have a chance of fooling bots; a true, no-response tarpit would use less energy, but is easily detected by bots and terminated.

Proof of work is just a terrible idea, once you’ve accepted that PoW is bad for the environment, which it demonstrably is.

You just need to wait for the proof of work to complete

I will never find the irony in this anything other than pathetic.

The one legitimate grievance against Bitcoin and other POW cryptocurrencies - the wasteful burning of energy to do throw-away calculations simply to prove the work has been done… the environmental cost of distributed scale meaningless CPU cycle waste purely for the purpose of wasting CPU cycles, has been so eagerly grasped by people who are largely doing it to foil another energy wasteful infotech invention.

It really is astonishing.