hCaptcha now runs on fifteen percent of the internet

Re:hCaptcha now runs on fifteen percent of the internet by protoduction on Wednesday November 25, 2020 @05:52PM (#25215174)

You're right that there is an electricity cost to solving this type of captcha - the same as there is an electricity cost to loading 2MB of JS+images and clicking the pictures with the fire hydrants (and the infrastructure behind that). It's hard to estimate how they compare (and what value you assign to the human labor performed and privacy loss).

20 seconds would be a fairly high difficulty. It's up to the site owner to decide what makes sense for them.

If anybody comes up with a useful computational task with a small bundle size that can be verified cheaply that would be the holy grail - until then the computation is only there as a form of hashcash.

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Re:hCaptcha now runs on fifteen percent of the internet by olliej on Wednesday November 25, 2020 @06:02PM (#25215264)

20s doesn’t matter when it’s someone else’s hardware (eg spammers using malware installed on victim machines).

It’s also nonsense to compare the computational cost of N seconds of sustained, maxed out useless computation to the milliseconds of compute time needed to decode an image, or the minimal power usage of waiting on network data.

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