phoogathrw

You can't use SETI@home for proof of work. The work target has to somehow involve a fully random process.

Lots of very smart people have tried this and failed. The best effort so far has been to find prime numbers, and even that turned out to not be a robust proof of work.

Have you considered that your customer might have just been telling you what you wanted to hear in the hopes of getting a discount?

Wow, did you really? Or is this a sarcastic comment? If serious, that's pretty amazing.

>Here's the thing: most of our clients LIKE the fact that we don't discuss price upfront.

Sorry, but absent reliable data, I'm calling BS here: I've never, ever met someone who likes having to call some random salesman to get a price and figure out if the service is even within a order of magnitude of their budget.

In fact, most people I know detest those kinds of games.

Ok, yeah that would be nice. But no one has figured out how to securely do productive work for proof of work. In fact, there are pretty good reasons to believe that it may even be impossible to create a secure yet productive proof of work algorithm.

I really like this guy's approach to open source projects: http://runtimelegend.com/abitopen.txt

Assuming this approach would relieve a lot of the stress I've experienced on my more popular projects. I'm seriously considering it.

As much as I like the idea behind Timber, I'd not recommend using it for a production site. It has some current security issues that the devs seem to both not understand AND to not be much concerned with (a frightening combination). Don't want to get too specific, but searching their github issues for reports on the usual suspects (SQL injection, etc) should show you all you need you know.

With the coming of WordPress REST, I'm hopeful that a group more secure minded starts working on WP templates.