You don’t need to spend $5000 to obtain the hash rate of a $5000 device on a rental basis. You may have heard of this thing called “the cloud”. Obtaining very high hash rates is effectively free, largely as a side effect of the crypto bust.
replyNot sure why anyone would characterize these scrapers im general as all being fly-by-night operations that don’t have two cents to scrape together.
And yet you have not addressed the point that many report that tricks like Anubis work.
replyIf they are so stupid an idea that they could never work, why do they seem to having the desired effect?
A significant amount of the effect is everything outside the proof of work. Not the cost of hashing but the need to run the javascript that submits it.
replyIf you've seen anyone post a comparison of crawl rate versus difficulty, I'd love to see it. There's probably some difference but I want to know how much of the overall effect it is.