IdeaWell

Project ideas from Hacker News discussions.

It took a year to ship WebAssembly in Anubis

Original Article

Hacker News Discussion

📝 Discussion Summary (Click to expand)

Three prevalent themes in the discussion

1. Economic trade‑off: making scraping costly vs. burdening users

Many commenters see the core idea as turning scraping into an expense, but they worry about the cost falling on ordinary visitors or becoming indistinguishable from cryptojacking.

  • “It's wild to me that PoW systems are how we sort the bot problem… the bummer is that all this 'work' is just wasted cycles, at least in crypto there is a token you can sell.” – chews
  • “The goal is to make scraping costly, not profitable.” – Levitating (replying to chews)
  • “Scraping would be costly in this world: scrapers would have to spend tokens… the website owner would receive tokens that they can then use… the cycles aren’t wasted.” – articulatepang
  • “unfortunately at that point it would be indistinguishable from running cryptojacking on your website” – xosc

2. Effectiveness and limits of the PoW approach

Opinions split on whether Anubis actually deters bots, especially given GPU/ASIC acceleration, memory‑hard Argon2, and adaptive scrapers.

  • “It’s not stopping anyone… This takes many minutes to solve on a cellphone, 9 ms on a cheap VPS.” – drum55
  • “Anubis reduces bot traffic” – Jtariiiii (counterpoint to drum55)
  • “The assumption is that requiring 1 second of compute before allowing a page load will have more impact on the people requesting 1000 pages/sec than it will on consumers requesting 1 page every minute.” – gruez (questioning the assumption)
  • “I don’t think a little argon2 is going to change shit all.” – kingstnap

3. Technical implementation & user‑experience concerns

Discussion also focuses on how the challenge is delivered (service workers, pre‑solving, cookie handling) and its impact on low‑end devices, compatibility, and alternatives.

  • “I’m probably going to lean towards using a Service Worker to renew challenges at a reduced difficulty.” – xena
  • “If you're taking any measures to reduce tracking… this won’t work.” – gruez (on cookie‑based solutions)
  • “Argon2 is already GPU‑accelerated.” – dist-epoch (counter to claims that it hinders GPUs)
  • “Privacy Pass does something similar…” – tomodachi94 (suggesting existing alternatives)
  • “The wasm2js flow doesn't currently have a way to update the progress bar… I gave up on a page because it was stuck at 0 hashes per second.” – Aachen (UX issue)

🚀 Project Ideas

Generating project ideas…

Anubis Token Wallet & Pre‑solver (Service Worker)

Summary

  • A browser extension/service worker that silently solves Anubis PoW challenges in the background, earning redeemable tokens for the user, letting them skip challenges on participating sites without manual waits.
  • Core value: genuine users gain frictionless browsing while site owners still receive economic proof‑of‑work from bots, turning wasted cycles into a usable credit system.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience Privacy‑conscious web users, site operators using Anubis, developers of browser extensions
Core Feature Background PoW solver that accumulates tokens redeemable for challenge bypass via a simple API
Tech Stack Service Workers (JavaScript/WebAssembly), IndexedDB for token storage, REST API for token verification, optional WASM‑optimized argon2id
Difficulty Medium
Monetization Revenue-ready: site owners pay a small fee per token redeemed (e.g., $0.00001 per token) or share a proportion of token value with the wallet provider

Notes

  • HN users asked for “ahead‑of‑time PoW” and “credit/tokens that my browser could then spend” (0x696C6961) and noted the UX pain of waiting on phones (0x696C6961, xen a).
  • Enables discussion on token economics, anti‑sybot measures, and provides a practical utility that reduces user friction while preserving PoW’s cost‑imposing effect on scrapers.

Useful PoW Marketplace for Scientific / Fuzzing Work

Summary

  • A platform where site owners submit useful computational micro‑tasks (e.g., protein‑folding fragments, game fuzzing for TAS, small ML inference) as PoW challenges; solvers (users or bots) earn tokens by completing genuine work instead of meaningless hashes.
  • Core value: converts the energy spent on PoW into socially valuable computation, making scraping expensive and productive, addressing the desire to make PoW “useful to society”.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience Researchers, open‑source projects, game preservation communities, site owners wanting to monetize traffic
Core Feature SDK for defining job specs, verification logic, and token payout; explorer for users to see available tasks and earned rewards
Tech Stack Backend: Node.js or Go with gRPC; Worker runtime: WASM + argon2id; Job execution: Docker containers or WASI sandbox; Token ledger: lightweight blockchain or centralized DB with audit logs
Difficulty High
Monetization Revenue-ready: platform takes a small percentage (e.g., 5%) of tokens paid out to workers; site owners can purchase premium job placement

Notes

  • Commenters suggested “replace it with something that is useful to society but not immediately profitable to a scraper, like science research” (saagarjha) and “Anubis helps fuzz old games to find timesaves in tool‑assisted speedruns” (xena).
  • Creates a tangible discussion point around altruistic PoW, opens opportunities for academic collaborations, and gives scrapers a way to pay for access by doing real work.

Cross‑site PoW Exchange Protocol with x402 Payments

Summary

  • A decentralized exchange (or federated service) that lets users trade PoW solutions earned on one website for access credits on another, using x402‑style HTTP 402 payment headers for seamless micro‑transactions.
  • Core value: eliminates repeated solving for users who visit many low‑traffic sites while preserving the economic cost barrier for bots, fulfilling the request to “exchange … Anubis POW” and “make Anubis challenges use a memory‑hard proof of work function”.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience Frequent web surfers, operators of niche blogs/forums, developers of Anubis‑protected sites
Core Feature Exchange API that accepts PoW proofs, issues exchangeable tokens, and verifies redemption via x402 headers; includes a reference wallet extension
Tech Stack Go or Rust for exchange service; libp2p for peer‑to‑peer token forwarding; x402 implementation in nginx/envoy middleware; optional ZK‑proof for PoW validity; frontend: React + WalletConnect
Difficulty Medium
Monetization Revenue-ready: exchange charges a tiny fee (e.g., 0.1% of token value) per trade; can also offer premium listing for sites wanting higher visibility

Notes

  • Users discussed “implement x402 payments to bypass the PoW” (packetlost) and “we could link it to a site … exchange some Reddit Anubis with some HN Anubis” (dist-epoch).
  • Encourages practical experimentation with micro‑payment standards, fosters cross‑site cooperation, and gives a concrete path to reduce user annoyance while keeping PoW’s anti‑abuse effect.

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