Trocador used to be a pleasure to use. No Javascript, it worked over tor, and it had an onion service. Then they got DDoSed. Turns out this is what causes the enshittification of the internet, that sites without javascript are trivial to DDoS. Now, the statement about no JS is gone, the onion service is gone, and if you try to connect over tor, if you can connect at all, you get DDoS Guard demanding you enable javascript so it can try to fingerprint your browser and force you to perform captchas. What if there was a better way?
You use a proof-of-work cryptocurrency that is not only microtransaction capable, but also "micro-mineable", i.e. the difficulty is low enough that you can solo mine multiple blocks per day even on modest hardware. For proof of concept you could use stagenet monero, but in the long term you would use a dedicated fourth Monero blockchain where transactions older than a certain age are pruned, because the idea is that PoWnet coins are something you mine and use rather than using them as a long-term store of value.
You go to website.app/NoBS/, and the site communicates in headers the current cost in PoW tokens of an access token good for X minutes of access and an appropriate amount of server resources for a non-bot user during that time. You have a web browser plugin that reads it, and if you've whitelisted the combination of site + cost it can autopay from a PoWnet wallet so you just go straight through.
No more javascript or reliance on third parties that might be compromised.
To keep people from rolling forward their PoWnet balance forever by making a transaction just before the outputs expire, PoWnet ouputs could have a telomere which is reduced by one every time they're transacted, so they also expire after a set number of sends. It would be a small value, not more than 5 at start, and merging outputs would use the least of the input t-values.
Or you could just pay for website access in minute amounts of mainnet Monero. But I expect people don't want to pay in real money, and I want there to be a way for people who don't have any mainnet Monero to still use the system.
But they did the opposite. The onion is gone. Presumably they have some reason for that?
Also onion sites in general are very slow because of the six hops. I'd like an open source solution that can be used by anyone, including clearnet sites, so that use of captchas and browser probing can be reduced across the entire web.
And Trocador couldn't go onion only because an increasing number of their partner exchanges were no longer willing to be available over .onion or i2p.
It's only three hops if, like Trocador, you don't need to hide the location of the server. They can (and should) enable HiddenServiceSingleHopMode. This hides the location of the client but not the location of the server. Six hops is only for darknet sites that need to hide the server location.
I mean, the tor proof of work mechanism is open source, so theoretically it could be adopted on the clear net with some modification
That might work, I will certainly look at it, but I like the idea of premining PoW tokens because it won't bog your browser down at the time you need to go through, and the cost can also be made higher. It could be used as a general cost for things that need spam protection, such as creating accounts, making posts, submitting contact forms.