Authentication and the Have I Been Pwned API
All the ways congestion controls are implemented on the web lead to a cognitively infantilizing UX, privacy violations, and even &quot;skynet&quot; enabling[1] (hyperbolic but nothing stopping it from happening).<p>&quot;Are you really human? What&#x27;s: 3 x 9&quot;<p>&quot;Can you click on images of buses?, hmmmm don&#x27;t believe you&#x27;re human still, can you click images of stores, hmmm now bikes, hmmm now vehicles, oh I didn&#x27;t mean all vehicles I just meant autos and not motorcycles, here quick copy this token, oh it expired? Too bad.  How about you click on images of buses for me...&quot;<p>&quot;Sorry, browsers that protect your privacy and location aren&#x27;t allowed.  We only allow users who are willing to deanonymize themselves.&quot;<p>&quot;Well we all know &#x2F;<i>those people</i>&#x2F; who come &#x2F;<i>that place</i>&#x2F; are antisocial users&quot;<p>&quot;Here&#x27;s your IP addresses back. Oh yeah, sorry about blacklisting them&quot;<p>This is a comment about the meta issue Troy faces.  If costs are rubegoldberg&#x27;ed to create a facade of &quot;free&quot;, it&#x27;s not actually free (even if user data isn&#x27;t being sold).  e.g. A median-wage (10e3USD&#x2F;year) world worker spending 20 seconds solving a captcha has an opportunity cost of 0.03USD[2].  Further more, having to solve congestion issues by implementing requirements to use closed&#x2F;inaccessible (credit cards) poorly programmable, sucks too.  Additionally, if a congestion solution is (&quot;I&#x27;d rather low-demand users have free access and high-demand users have expensive access) isn&#x27;t solved by having a flat rate (which a &quot;keep it low cost, mantra is incentivized to keep low&quot;).  There is market demand for: If your demands on my service are x, I&#x27;ll give you back the $3.50 but if you consume y resources You have to pay Z.<p>Wouldn&#x27;t it be great if there was a way machines could own money, send it over a layer-2 network, that was open, cheaper than credit cards, faster than L1 bitcoin, and get your money refunded if you didn&#x27;t demand excessive server resources, all while not using game-able &quot;good users come from here&quot; privacy violating algos?<p>This is why micropayment using layer-2 bitcoin on the Lightning Network has significantly-valuable, latent, economic-coordination implications.  Micropayments aren&#x27;t about paying for 1&#x2F;1000 of a peanut.  They&#x27;re about obviating all the engineering, social, product costs dealt with dealing with Marginal Value, Marginal Cost issues.  BAD: The marginal cost of anti-DoS counter measures can always be above the marginal value of deploying them (&quot;listen folks it costs to much to keep this service running, we&#x27;ll have to shut it down&quot;.  UNSTOPPABLE: If a price is put on service requests (Services on Demand)[3] the marginal value will never be below the marginal cost (&quot;I can keep this AED locator map service running because I know a spamming request will incur costs above my production costs&quot;).<p>In a future where L2 Bitcoin payment&#x2F;Lightning client infrastructure is prevalent, gone will be the days of annoying, productivity-draining captchas, attribute-discriminating access.  Troy could charged a 0.01USD &quot;bond&quot; payment for a request (Which he could give back fast and costlessly to a low-demand user).  Meaning the 14e3&#x2F;min requests for 3 hours would have required the high-demand user a payment of $25,000USD[4].\<p>0.01USD refundable payment for honest users.<p>$25,000 USD penalty for high-demand &quot;spammer&quot;<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.redd.it&#x2F;pb5nggw3rulz.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.redd.it&#x2F;pb5nggw3rulz.jpg</a><p>[2] 20&#x2F;60&#x2F;60 * 5<p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@soddiraju&#x2F;the-not-so-micro-potential-for-micropayments-c581d3090d47" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@soddiraju&#x2F;the-not-so-micro-potential-for...</a><p>[4] 14e3 * .01 * 60 * 3