> It seems to me that ideas like this are unworkable due to income inequality.

There's no reason you can't have an attestation entity that's based on volunteer hours, provided you can convince sites-in-general that your proof-units are good.

The core theme isn't about cash, but that:that:

1. There are kinds of activity someone can do which demonstrates some kind of distinct actual expenditure of time or effort (not self-dealing.)

2. A trusted agent could attest to that activity.

3. Requiring (proof of) activity gives you an decent way to ward off the majority of bots/spam in a relatively simple way that doesn't become a complex privacy nightmare.

It's a similar outcome to sending CPU-bound challenges to a client, except without the deliberate-waste and without a strong bias towards people who can afford their own fast computer.

The issue is that it another system that puts the "blame" and/or work people instead of dealing with the root cause. So in that case nothing changes.

Because I wonder how are people going to do volunteering hours, get it recognized trough red tape/bureaucracy if they're already struggling to survive.

Is still completely asymmetric in that the poorer you are, the harder you have to work to now simply access the same resources online as everyone else.

And the poor get poorer.

Well not in places like Vietnam (7% gdp growth/year) or a lot of the less developed world.