I don’t think OP meant you pay directly, just that you volunteer to do some part of the PoW (of some chain designed for this purpose) on behalf of the site, to its credit.

That’s not much of a different ask from Anubis. It just commandeers the compute for some useful purpose.

If you can tell me how to implement protein folding without having to have gigabytes of scientific data involved, I'll implement it today.

You could go viral[1] for implementing a Monero Miner[2][3] in Anubis. The check no longer denies someone; it lets EVERYONE in once they've paid the price (mining). This now makes false positives impossible, solving a lot of problems[4]. [1] https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-website-runs-a-crypt... [2] https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/anubis.html [Where they bring up CoinHive and JSEcoin]. [3] https://github.com/JSEcoin/website [4] https://anubis.techaro.lol/blog/2025/cpu-core-odd/

Have a look at folding@home. Client and data could be less than 10mb.

https://foldingathome.org/

Making a proof of work algorithm do some actually useful work is very much an unsolved problem.

I don’t necessarily mean “useful” in the sense of scientific research or something. Simply transferring value to the creators of the resource being accessed (a la a blockchain) instead of doing throwaway work would be an improvement.

Exactly, instead of trying to totally prevent the bots/AI scrapers, make them "pay you" in compute to access and scrape. It needs to be solved.

It would be more like using a javascript webminer to mine for you a bit before you get access. This would be the "proof-of-work" needed to then proceed to scrape.