It's still very unclear to me how Anubis is supposed to work in the long term or even the medium term. The assumption is that scrappers, a.k.a. AI companies, a.k.a. those who hog all the RAM, are short of memory...?
The assumption is that there will always be some population distribution in terms of effort expended as well as in terms of problems caused. At present it's the lowest effort actors that are causing the highest number of problems. So an 80% (or even just a 20%) solution largely solves the practical problem faced by site operators.
If against all odds it turns out that skiddies (or agents or AI billionaires or what have you) are willing to burn inordinate amounts of RAM and CPU just to scrape autogenerated cgit pages that are of approximately zero value to them to begin with then I guess we'll just have to cross that bridge when we come to it.
It would be cool if the POW could be done ahead of time. That way I don't get stuck waiting while I'm working. Some type of credit/tokens that my browser could then spend.
Then we could implement an exchange, so that if you generate too much Anubis POW, you could exchange it with others.
We could link it to a site, you generate for HN, I for Reddit, but it so happens that you visited Reddit more and I HN, so we depleted our Anubis POW, so we could exchange some Reddit Anubis with some HN Anubis.
Yes, I also strongly suspect that this is only going to move more parts of scrapers onto consumer devices. The egress proxies are already there, why not use a little bit of the compute as well?
It's wild to me that PoW systems are how we sort the bot problem... the bummer is that all this "work" is just wasted cycles, at least in crypto there is a token you can sell.
Scraping would be costly in this world: scrapers would have to spend tokens in order to get the webpage.
But, in this world, the website owner would receive tokens that they can then use to do whatever they want, including paying for servers and bandwidth. This is the sense in which the cycles aren’t wasted: the website owner now has cash to spend.
Effectively, both scrapers and ordinary users would be paying for the privilege of getting website bytes.
This also solves the problem of having to wait for your phone to solve the challenge while you’re browsing: you can buy or mine some tokens ahead of time and pay them as soon as challenged. So can the scrapers, but because they’re accessing enormous numbers of pages it’s hopefully prohibitively expensive for them.
I want to do this eventually, but it's hard to split things into the micro-tasks that would be required to make this work on Anubis. One of the ideas I'm throwing around is a world where Anubis helps fuzz old games to find timesaves in tool-assisted speedruns. It's harder than you think.
Yup was thinking the same: make honest people pay $0.00001 when they visit the site (in electricity/compute), have the challenge made so that only the website wins a tiny something. Bleed the bots dry.
> This makes Anubis challenges use a memory-hard proof of work function (argon2id) instead of just a CPU hard one. It also means that the "hey Claude vibeslop me a CUDA Anubis solver" route is on its way to being fundamentally dead.
It exists to copy what google, cloudflare and co have done for decades.
Not innovating, actually doing it worse and wasting more resources than Google and Cloudflare if you ignore the fact that it avoids these companies to have your traffic pattern.
But nothing prevents to do it nice and quietly, like "sorry to disturb you, we waste your time and CPU cycle and energy but your website will load in a second." Without retarded post-teenager manga drawing or anything like that.
It's funny, because on the scale of things that are annoying an uncool, I find someone saying the word "retarded" as a pejorative in the year 2026 to be far, far more annoying and uncool than a harmless anime-inspired mascot for an open source project.
People like you are why keeping the anime furry in Anubis is a soft requirement. You can really sort the wheat from the chaff by deliberately pissing off the wrong people.
Anubis is significantly better than Cloudfare from a ux perspective because it doesn't require interacting with the page. Being gated by turnstiles and having to stop what youre doing while you're waiting is infuriating. To say nothing of Google hard blocking people it doesn't like out of websites and alluding to moving towards ID verification for its captchas.
You sound like a child throwing a tantrum. Before throwing around insults calling people post-teenager, you should maybe look at your own behavior. Is adult behavior getting angry to the point of swearing because you saw a cartoon character?
If against all odds it turns out that skiddies (or agents or AI billionaires or what have you) are willing to burn inordinate amounts of RAM and CPU just to scrape autogenerated cgit pages that are of approximately zero value to them to begin with then I guess we'll just have to cross that bridge when we come to it.
I feel like Anubis is ironically speedrunning a lot of discoveries the crypto folks have already made several years ago...
We could link it to a site, you generate for HN, I for Reddit, but it so happens that you visited Reddit more and I HN, so we depleted our Anubis POW, so we could exchange some Reddit Anubis with some HN Anubis.
Lmao yeah no. I don't think a little argon2 is going to change shit all.
I mean the thesis of Anubis itself is "scrappers are compute limited (in ways that consumer devices are not)" which has its own massive flaws.
That would defeat the purpose. The goal is to make scraping costly, not profitable.
But, in this world, the website owner would receive tokens that they can then use to do whatever they want, including paying for servers and bandwidth. This is the sense in which the cycles aren’t wasted: the website owner now has cash to spend.
Effectively, both scrapers and ordinary users would be paying for the privilege of getting website bytes.
This also solves the problem of having to wait for your phone to solve the challenge while you’re browsing: you can buy or mine some tokens ahead of time and pay them as soon as challenged. So can the scrapers, but because they’re accessing enormous numbers of pages it’s hopefully prohibitively expensive for them.
> This makes Anubis challenges use a memory-hard proof of work function (argon2id) instead of just a CPU hard one. It also means that the "hey Claude vibeslop me a CUDA Anubis solver" route is on its way to being fundamentally dead.
Nice.
https://github.com/eternal-flame-AD/pow-buster - Browser extension that already used WASM to accelerate the anubis solver, among others.
https://github.com/kasper93/anubis_webgpu - Browser extension that uses webgpu, for another order-of-magnitude speedup (depending on your GPU of course).
Not innovating, actually doing it worse and wasting more resources than Google and Cloudflare if you ignore the fact that it avoids these companies to have your traffic pattern.
But nothing prevents to do it nice and quietly, like "sorry to disturb you, we waste your time and CPU cycle and energy but your website will load in a second." Without retarded post-teenager manga drawing or anything like that.
You sound like a child throwing a tantrum. Before throwing around insults calling people post-teenager, you should maybe look at your own behavior. Is adult behavior getting angry to the point of swearing because you saw a cartoon character?