this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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I will never find the irony in this anything other than pathetic.
The one legitimate grievance against Bitcoin and other POW cryptocurrencies - the wasteful burning of energy to do throw-away calculations simply to prove the work has been done... the environmental cost of distributed scale meaningless CPU cycle waste purely for the purpose of wasting CPU cycles, has been so eagerly grasped by people who are largely doing it to foil another energy wasteful infotech invention.
It really is astonishing.
either you have the service with anubis or you have no service at all
unlike pyramid coins, anubis serves a purpose
It still uses Proof-of-Work, in which the coal being burned is only to prove that you burned the coal.
Everything uses energy
Do you have any measurements on power usage? It seems very minor.
who gives a shit
Not many, but I sure wish all.
The point is to make it too expensive for them, so they leave you alone (or, ideally, totally die but that's a long way off). They're making a choice to harvest data on your site. Make them choose not to. It saves energy in the long run.
Do you have a better way? It is way more private than anything else I've seen.
From a energy usage perspective it also isn't bad. Spiking the CPU for a few seconds is minor especially compared to other tasks.
I willl never find the irony in how tech literate people still make assumptions about technology without reading up on it.
Proof of work does not equal mass power usage. The proof of work here is fingerprinting.
It really is astonishing.
Do you understand how Proof-of-Work works? Perhaps you can give me an ELI5 that shows that it does not use the client's CPU to perform calculations for only the purpose of proving that the client's CPU performed the calculations?
I do, yes, you are just too crypto-focused. Anubis uses the result of the PoW to fingerprint, I.E. to do a job greater than just the calculation. It's also an extremely efficient alg. I won't read the docs for you, but feel free to read them first if you would like to discuss it further.
Not if it's an effective proof-of-work anti-scraping mechanism. The point of these are to make it prohibitively expensive for scrapers to harvest data.
A mire energy efficient way to do this is with lags and tar pits, which do not cause CPU cycles to be wasted.
Any mechanism - any - that uses proof-of-work is by definition wasting CPU cycles. If there's a useful waste product, like boinc, where the work that's proved to be done is science, then the POW isn't pure waste energy. There are certainly more efficient ways of generating fingerprints than PoW; Google and Facebook are peerless at fingerprinting without any PoW at all. The value of these ~~fingerprint coins~~ tokens is entirely incidental to the real purpose: to cost the scraper CPU cycles, cost them energy, and make scraping less profitable.
Anubis is all of the execution cost of cryptocurrency, without the financial flavoring.