I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)

I hope we can end the CAPTCHA experiment soon. It didn't work.

Phone verification isn't good either, but for as much as I hate phone verification at least it actually raises the cost of spamming somewhat. CAPTCHA does not. Almost all turnkey CAPTCHA services can be solved for pennies.

Solving the problems of SPAM and malicious traffic will be challenging... I am worried it will come down to three possible things:

- Anonymity of users: validating someone's real-life identity sufficiently would make it possible to permanently ban malicious individuals and filter out bots with good effectiveness, but it will destroy anonymity online. In my opinion, literally untenable.

- Closing the platform: approaches like Web Environment Integrity and Private Access Tokens pave the way for how the web platform could be closed down. The vast majority of web users use Google Chrome or Safari on a device with Secure Boot, so the entire boot chain can be attested. The number of users that can viably do this will only increase over time. In this future, the web ceases to meaningfully be open: alternatives to this approach will continue to become less and less useful (e.g. machine learning may not achieve AGI but it's going to kick the ass of every CAPTCHA in sight) so it will become increasingly unlikely you'll be able to get into websites without it.

- Accountability of network operators: Love it or hate it, the Internet benefits a lot from gray-area operators that operate with little oversight or transparency. However, another approach to getting rid of malicious traffic is to push more accountability to network operators, severing non-compliant providers off of the Internet. This would probably also suck, and would incentivize abusing this power.

It's tricky, though. What else can you do? You can try to reduce the incentives to have malicious traffic, but it's hard to do this without decreasing the value that things offer. You can make malicious traffic harder by obfuscation, but it's hard to stop motivated parties.

Either way, it feels like the era of the open web is basically over. The open web may continue to exist, but it will probably be overshadowed by a new and much more closed off web.

There is another option.

CAPTCHA is useful only when it is costly to solve. It is a costly signal that this is a real person, or at least is more than 1/10^9th of a real person (you're not running a fully automated spam system).

The postal service also has costs - everybody that wants to move something through the postal service needs to buy a stamp. Transport fees are a 'natural' way to moderate traffic and deter spam.

Various combinations of network architecture and cryptocoinage permit you to invoke transport fees per attempted transmission/login. Sensible ones, if every spam email or login guess costs even 1 penny it becomes prohibitive for most fully automated spam applications. The cryptocoin aspect is specifically about preserving anonymity of private wallet access while permitting the cash-like transactions that stamps enable.

This sounds like the same argument that was made for about 10 years (2000 to 2010) that micropayments would save traditional (print) media in a digital world. It didn't work due to market fragmentation and friction to make a payment.

And, the reality of your fancy idea is that normie users would turn away if they made a mistake on the CAPTCHA and were suddenly presented with a screen "charging" them one pence.

Would be great if the US government somehow facilitated micropayment. Either by creating their own system or removing the capital gains reporting requirements on crypto (maybe up to $10k/year).

If micropayment is such an amazing solution to these problems, why haven't we seen a working solution after more than 20 years of talking about it? Why doesn't HN have multiple competing micropayment startups? To me, the results speak for themselves.

Another outcome that I could never understand: The original conversation was micropayments for traditional print media that was moving into the digital age. Why didn't they all band together to create an industry standard that defined (and possibly administered) a micropayment system? In the end, paywalls were the solution, and winner-mostly-takes-all when print moved to digital. Look at the decline in medium to small newspapers in the last 20 years in the US. It is devastating, but a few national, major newspapers are doing OK.