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I'm working on this with a private prototype. I'm probably going to lean towards using a Service Worker (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Service_Wor...) to renew challenges at a reduced difficulty. Stay tuned!
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That just creates another problem: if you're taking any measures to reduce tracking (ie. clearing cookies on shutdown or using temporary containers), this won't work. If anubis was being deployed on a site that a user visits often (eg. HN), the user might be convinced to whitelist it, but most anubis deployments are on random blogs or fediverse instances that I might not visit again in months. I'm certainly am not going to whitelist those sites, nor am I going to enable cookies wholesale just to avoid solving challenges.
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Look, if you're going out of your way to break expected behaviour on websites you shouldn't be surprised when people code to the most common denominator and then you have weird subtle breakage as a result.
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Gotta agree. Turning tracking cookies off? Sure! Turning session cookies off and then complaining that the server doesn’t remember you? Uhhh…

And while I’m sympathetic to the idea of not wanting to run JS, to a first approximation modern browsers are JS engines that have graphical displays. How things should be vs how they are is a classic is/ought problem. The world took a vote on what a browser’s meant for and we lost. Fighting it today is rough; tomorrow, futile.

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>Gotta agree. Turning tracking cookies off? Sure! Turning session cookies off and then complaining that the server doesn’t remember you? Uhhh…

No, because there are technologies that don't have this issue, eg. privacy pass.

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There's no mechanistic difference between the two types of cookies, let's not pretend this is an actual config choice that people are making.

Whenever I hit Anubis, I simply go "keep your secrets then" and take my leave. The vast majority of the sites posted to HN (that catch my fancy) work fine or fine enough, and are better for it.

If I really, really desperately want to check something out, I can always just turn stuff back on. Turns out, I rarely do.

Shoutout to the particularly dogshit few that don't just require cookies and JS, but even third party JS. For reading a blogpost or a message thread!

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Clearing cookies when all you want to do is read static content is not "breaking expected behaviour on websites".
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[flagged]
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Or something that shadier websites could calculate ahead of time in your browser, then spend on your behalf.

I feel like Anubis is ironically speedrunning a lot of discoveries the crypto folks have already made several years ago...

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What if the work output was bound to a particular source IP? That'd stop most "theft" at the expense of discards when your device switches networks.
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Anubis does this. Happy Eyeballs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Eyeballs), IPv6 privacy extensions (https://oneuptime.com/blog/post/2026-01-15-ipv6-privacy-exte...), and devices migrating between home and mobile IP addresses as the person moves have all caused issues with this. Fixing this is hard, but I have been trying.
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Privacy Pass does something similar to what you describe: https://developers.cloudflare.com/waf/tools/privacy-pass/
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I wonder if you could convince the Anubis author to implement x402 payments to bypass the PoW
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This could be done at the web server level, not requiring changes to Anubis
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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.

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And then, we can inextricably link it to a new cryptocurrency -- let's call it BotCoin -- and make Sam Altman pay for it!
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Basically reinventing crypto one step at the time.
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