This is one of the use-cases of proof-of-work, but the rest of what makes something cryptocurrency isn't necessary. There is no need for a blockchain here, and the cost can be paid directly in compute time.

Again, cryptocurrency would allow a proof-of-work mechanism but offload it so it needn't be real-time.

That is, do the proof-of-work before visiting the website, then present the currency token that proves the work has been done. The blockchain is there to prevent double spending of the currency token.

I do feel like this is a kind of "those who don't understand it are doomed to re-invent it" type of technologies.

No, I understand. I WANT it to be real time. I don’t want it to be offloaded.

You don’t need to worry about double spending or any of the privacy issues that come with a blockchain when the work is done real time. I know exactly how much work is being done on the server per request with this solution - one hash. There is no need to crawl through a block chain, or submit a transaction, or wait for an external system to catch up.

I want a solution to these crawling bots, not a distributed database. So why would I reach for a distributed database when this simple proof of work system works better, is more understandable, and doesn’t have external dependencies?

There's a sentiment here that I think is valid and I'm struggling to tease out the best version of it, along with providing a valid response.

I'll mention that, in an extreme case, one could provide a proof-of-work challenge that's directly tied to some cryptocurrency mining effort, so that the work/energy expenditure is captured by the one providing the challenge. This has the effect of the challenger giving money to the one providing the challenge, just in a real-time proof-of-work way. Since money is effectively being exchanged anyway, this punishes systems that don't allow up-front payments to do away with the page load delay.

> Paying fractions of a penny to view websites has minimal impact

Although true in an ideal financial sense, it's demonstrably false because having a pay wall of any kind will severely limit usage.

The fractions of a penny are in compute resources. cock.li required proof of work (10 minutes on a phone browser) to register a new mailbox before it went down.

Demonstrably false with a payment service like PayPal but could still be an option for some type of online payment. One can imagine a payment method that's transparent, integrated and seamless. Maybe something like limits can be set with features to allow, prompt or flat out deny websites that violate some payment policy.

My view is that when the payment threshold is so low, the issue is inconvenience or user friction, not the amount of money involved. I suspect people would be fine with small payments if the user experience was better. For example, Amazon, Netflix, iTunes or Spotify.

I'd rather just be able to click a link and not have to worry about wallet, transaction fees, keeping my keys safe, etc.

Patron sites are a bit like that, but undermining effect is real - content quality shows a down trend when real Internet points become the metric, as opposed to fake ones.

The problem is, it kills anonymity - it allows at the very least the government to tie each web page visit, each resource load, back to a real person.

And no, "anonymous mixer" services don't work either. They're yet another layer of useless profiteering middlemen, which the web already has more than enough of.

What about Monero/XMR? Isn't is fully anonymous by design?

TOR used to make the same claims, turned out the NSA actually can to a degree correlate traffic given that they have their eyes literally everywhere on the planet.

I wouldn't trust anything to be safe from the dragnet surveillance apparatus of FVEY.

That seems to be a much weaker claim than "allows at the very least the government to tie each web page visit, each resource load, back to a real person"

That was related to payment via Monero/XMR/...

The problem is, if you want some "proof of money"/"proof of stake", site operators set that up on their own which is a ton of work and people will not want to set up payments for their favourite porn site AND the government can trace back people from payments to site visits, or site operators contract a major vendor (similar to Stripe, Paypal, ...) who handles it and can then trivially be subpoena-ed for records.

But how do you solve the transaction cost problem? It doesn't make sense to pay a fraction of a cent for access when you have to pay a lot more than that in order to transfer the value.

Isn't that the value proposition of crypto?