UI automation is necessary for accessibility

If you're interested in this space, check out the Etherium ecosystem, its compute "juice", and various slashing strategies. You don't have to be some kind of "crypto bro" to appreciate the hardness of the problems you get when you try to simultaneously have 1) accountability, and 2) anonymity.

In the present discussion, we can model web fetches as "spends" of some token (whether it's monetary or not!). Accessing a web page? That's a spend. How do you prevent people just copying access credentials to 1,000 machines and spending them in parallel? That's the double-spend problem, which crypto people have given a ton of thought. How do you maintain rate limits tied to an actor? This problem is isomorphic to wallet management. How do you give humans some reasonable number of accesses per day without enabling crawlers to simulate 10,000 "humans" per box?

The solution is going to come down to some zero-knowledge identity attestation scheme. You just can't have regular people competing on an open market with big scrapers for access tokens, and the only way you can distinguish regular people (so they get free or cheap access tokens) and bots (who should pay market rate) is to remotely attest a unique human identity in such a way as to prevent creating infinity "humans" out of thin air but also reveal nothing about which human is doing want. Devilishly hard problem.

There *are* points in mechanism-design space where all this stuff works out, but it's *absolutely* not trivial, especially if you want to maintain privacy. All the people in this thread saying we should "just" rate-limit humans or machines or that we should "just" bootstrap a micropayments ecosystem are barely scratching the surface of how hard this problem really is. It's not so much even the cryptography (tons of recent progress here) but the social bootstrapping stuff.

What's worse is that our social structures aren't set up to incentivize solving the problem. No VC is going to get 1,000x returns on this stuff, academia and the state get distracted for various reasons, and on and on in ways I don't want to get into. It's a nasty chicken-and-egg problem that's important to solve.