High Anubis difficulty is annoying the hell out of me for several sites. And it's starting to not block LLM bots anymore?
> 33% are now solving the math and getting through to the main site — because apparently what we have to offer is worth spending a ton of cycles to calculate the Anubis challenge.
Visions of vast data centers surrounded by fields of browning grass, in which aging, rusting, formerly extremely expensive hardware is spending billions of compute cycles looking at anime catgirls
Unfortunately we're apt to run into some kind of Jeavons Paradox where the hardware gets so much faster in those few years will be able to slurp massive amounts of data cheaply so the problem never really ends.
[−]marginalia_nu · 2026-08-30 Sun 16:41 UTC ·
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It's very likely the last few years of bot behavior is the consequence of the residential proxy business booming. This is indirectly due to AI company crawling, but the fact that they are as cheap and available as they are changes the incentives for anyone using them toward reckless and unsustainable request behavior, as there is no risk of burning your IPs, and very small chances of seeing any consequences of essentially DDoS:ing a website.
[−]MithrilTuxedo · 2026-08-30 Sun 16:03 UTC ·
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Has anyone considered having Anubis perform more valuable hashing?
Like, maybe you can't stop the LLM bots, but you can use them as one-off Bitcoin pool mining pool participants. You have to assume that making them find hash values with N leading zeroes has led to finding hash values with more than N leading zeroes. Maybe run a Bitcoin node under there and let each visitor take a couple swings for you with their pickaxes.
> 33% are now solving the math and getting through to the main site — because apparently what we have to offer is worth spending a ton of cycles to calculate the Anubis challenge.
Like, maybe you can't stop the LLM bots, but you can use them as one-off Bitcoin pool mining pool participants. You have to assume that making them find hash values with N leading zeroes has led to finding hash values with more than N leading zeroes. Maybe run a Bitcoin node under there and let each visitor take a couple swings for you with their pickaxes.
It's not really going to help though because the scrapers using residential proxies aren't burning their own compute.