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   Alexandre Oliva (lxo@snac.lx.oliva.nom.br)'s status on Saturday, 29-Mar-2025 09:42:12 JST Alexandre Oliva
   new blog post: against proof of waste
   https://blog.lx.oliva.nom.br/2025-03-28-against-proof-of-waste.en.html
   
   As web servers get overwhelmed by LLM bots, some operators are resorting to programs that demand visiting web clients to perform some relatively expensive computation to be granted access to the website. This is called Proof of Work, but when that computation doesn't yield any useful results, it might as well be called Proof of Waste. Why not get clients to compute something useful and valuable, so that LLM scrapers become an essentially infinite supply of computing power, and our servers pay for themselves and for the creative works we put in them?
   
   • dilbert 1 likes this.
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     Alexandre Oliva (lxo@snac.lx.oliva.nom.br)'s status on Saturday, 29-Mar-2025 20:05:02 JST Alexandre Oliva

     in reply to

     • bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471
     what if it makes the service unavailable to humans like me (this is true), while making for bots to waste more computing without relieving the server from any load (this will be counterfactual, thus unknowable)? would you still consider it useful?
     
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     bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471 (bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 29-Mar-2025 20:05:03 JST bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471

     in reply to

     @lxo because the expensive-to-compute result needs to be easy to verify.

     If the correctness of the result isn't knowable by the server without doing all the work again, then it fails as a proof-of-work verification.

     That's the reason one-way cryptographic functions are used, and not work such as, say, protein folding.

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     bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471 (bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 29-Mar-2025 20:05:03 JST bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471

     in reply to

     @lxo besides, if the work keeps the service available to humans while removing the cost of bots, then the work _is useful._

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     Alexandre Oliva (lxo@snac.lx.oliva.nom.br)'s status on Saturday, 29-Mar-2025 20:14:40 JST Alexandre Oliva

     in reply to

     • bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471
     • home
     there are plenty of problems that are very expensive to solve and very easy to verify. all NP-complete problems are like that. all of these can serve as proof-of-useful-work, there's no need to demand proof-of-waste. plus, verification can also be made into proof-of-useful-work, if you're smart enough.
     
     now, the token-granters need not really be concerned with any of that: it could be up to the customers paying for computing to be performed by other parties to figure out how to break up their problems into smaller verifiable pieces.
     
     even if they're hard to break up, the architecture could have room for longer tasks that grant more tokens, that dedicated compute machines (as opposed to browser-based PoWs) could engage in.
     
     I don't know enough about proteinfolding@home@mastodon.social to tell how verifiable the results are, but I know SETI@home@mastodon.social had verification built into the architecture. those are inspiring examples of very distributed computing architectures, not necessarily systems that could be trivially integrated into such a hostile environment as proof-of-useful-work systems.
     
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     bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471 (bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 29-Mar-2025 20:30:54 JST bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471

     in reply to

     • home

     @lxo @home no, not all NP-complete problems are like that.

     You give me a map, and tell me to solve the traveling salesman problem, and I give you a result. How do you verify the result I give you _really is_ the shortest possible path, and not a lie?

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     Alexandre Oliva (lxo@snac.lx.oliva.nom.br)'s status on Saturday, 29-Mar-2025 20:30:54 JST Alexandre Oliva

     in reply to

     • bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471
     • home
     maybe go back to your reference book and see how the traveling salesman problem that is NP-complete is defined.
     
     while at that, look at the definition of NP-complete: problems that (apparently) cannot be solved in polynomial time, but whose solutions can be verified in polynomial time
     
     CC: @home@mastodon.social
     
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     bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471 (bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 29-Mar-2025 20:34:29 JST bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471

     in reply to

     @lxo if the point is to not make the service available to humans, but to make neural networks do useful work, then what you should be using is... a neural network.

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     Alexandre Oliva (lxo@snac.lx.oliva.nom.br)'s status on Saturday, 29-Mar-2025 20:34:29 JST Alexandre Oliva

     in reply to

     • bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471
     trolling much?
     
     now, if you weren't trolling and this was an honest misunderstanding: the current browser-based proof-of-waste systems make the service unavailable to people with accessibility needs that rule out javascript, like me.
     
     also, they do not stop bots, at best they demand them to spend more (traditional) computing resources to train their neural nets, while adding more load on the server (because of the added Proof-of-Waste server side).
     
     that makes it useless, per your own definition
     
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     Alexandre Oliva (lxo@snac.lx.oliva.nom.br)'s status on Saturday, 29-Mar-2025 22:36:01 JST Alexandre Oliva

     in reply to

     • bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471
     that's exactly the race we're already losing
     
     they have infinite computing power, we don't, and most of us are limited by the battery life of slow devices
     
     that's the externalization of costs that server operators who adopt proof of waste are duplicating from crawlers, sending us a "screw you" like the one they got from crawlers
     
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     bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471 (bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 29-Mar-2025 22:36:02 JST bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471

     in reply to

     @lxo except in practice, it has reduced traffic to the affected services and made them more available to most humans. Otherwise, the humans in question wouldn't be using them.

     Even if the bots are programmed to solve these problems, the point is to make redundant, repeated visits prohibitively expensive, which matters when the LLM bots are performing thousands of times the visits that human actors are.

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     Alexandre Oliva (lxo@snac.lx.oliva.nom.br)'s status on Saturday, 29-Mar-2025 22:39:14 JST Alexandre Oliva

     in reply to

     • bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471
     sure, that was my first thought.
     
     but why should I stop at something that will only repeal crawler bots, if we can (contribute to?) solve the problem of funding community servers and the production of cultural works?
     
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     bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471 (bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 29-Mar-2025 22:39:15 JST bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471

     in reply to

     @lxo what I consider to be much more viable is an offline verifier for people without JavaScript in the browser. Provide a form with a difficulty and an input box, and allow people to run some CLI tool or such to produce an output that can be pasted into the form.

     The fact that crawlers don't do proof-of-work right now isn't really the point of PoW and can potentially be patched relatively quickly anyway.

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     bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471 (bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 29-Mar-2025 22:42:42 JST bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471

     in reply to

     @lxo but people have been talking about making PoW systems that do some useful scientific work since Bitcoin in 2009, and in that time nobody's actually built it. I don't think that's for lack of effort.

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     Alexandre Oliva (lxo@snac.lx.oliva.nom.br)'s status on Saturday, 29-Mar-2025 22:42:42 JST Alexandre Oliva

     in reply to

     • bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471
     any pointers to such talking? I'm curious to see what has been tried (if it has), and why it hasn't succeeded (if it really hasn't)
     
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     bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471 (bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 29-Mar-2025 23:06:45 JST bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471

     in reply to

     @lxo it's mostly pipe dreams on crypto forums by people who... don't build software.

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     bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471 (bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 29-Mar-2025 23:06:45 JST bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471

     in reply to

     @lxo A quick google points to https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1242.pdf which itself references multiple different attempts, but each falling short in some respect.

     Alexandre Oliva likes this.