I've had that idea for years.

Two versions that I experimented with. One is where the incoming POW hashes contribute to hashing power for some blockchain mining. An alternative "pay as you use the API" system.

The other using hashcash. Just a way to slow down abuse.

Both, however, suffer from the downside that many/all "ASIC resisting crypto mining" suffer from as well: the cheapest CPU power is CPU power from machines/power you don't own. Botnets, viruses, trojans etc.

So such a mechanism to throtthe or protect APIs won't hold back spammers and abusers for long.

Dirty energy is (often) cheap, so that's the energy the bad actors will use. I don't know that incentivizing bad actors to waste energy in a climate crisis is the best way to fight this problem.

You might correctly claim clean energy is often cheaper, but you must also consider the regions in which they'll get away with nefarious activity, and whether those areas have made the investments into making clean energy cheap.

I was specifically talking about "ASIC resistant crypto mining".

>Dirty energy is (often) cheap, so that's the energy the bad actors will use

Hmm, I don't get this, surely all actors will want the cheapest energy, no? The problem being the underlying one, that the dirty energy doesn't pay its externalities and is thus cheaper than renewables.

My guess is most bad actors will just use stolen energy (your computer with a botnet on it).

I'm not sure whether that's genius or horrifying. On the one hand, that could form the micropayments network the web always needed. On the other hand, it would enable quite a bit of abuse on its own.