I’m not the person who brought git up.

Then I apologize. All I can offer is that it’s a weakness of my client that it’s difficult and outside the inbox workflow to see any history other than the comment to which you’re replying. Not an excuse; just an explanation.

Work is the thing you’re complaining about, not the proof.

If given the option, I’d prefer all computing to have zero cost; sure. But no, I’m not complaining abou t the work. I’ll complain about inefficient work, but the real issue is work for work’s sake; in particular, systems designed specifically where the only important fact us proving that someone burned X pounds of coal to get a result. Because, while exaggerated and hyperbolically started, that’s exactly what Proof-of-Work systems are. All PoW systems care about is that the client provably consumed a certain amount of CPU power. The result is the work is irrelevant for anything but proving that someone did work.

With exceptions like BOINC, the work itself from PoW systems provides no other value.

Compare this to endlessh.

This is probably wrong, because you’re using the salesman idea.

It’s not. Computer networks can open only so many sockets at a time; threading on a single computer is finite, and programmers normally limit the amount of concurrency because high concurrency itself can cause performance issues.

If they’re going to use the energy anyway, we might as well make them get less value.

They’re going to get their value anyway, right? This doesn’t stop them; it just makes each call to this more expensive. In the end, they do the work and get the data; it just cost them - and the environment - more.

Do you think this will stop scrapers? Or is it more of a “fuck you”, but with a cost to the planet?

Honey pots are a better solution; they’re far more energy efficient, and have the opportunity to poison the data. Poisoned data is more like what you suggest: they’re burning the energy anyway, but are instead getting results that harm their models. Projects like Nepenthes go in the right direction. PoW systems are harmful - straight up harmful. They’re harmful by preventing access to people who don’t use JavaScript, and they’re harmful in exactly the same way crypto mining is.