I understand that the developers are leaning toward a captcha based free distribution.

Still, I would like to make you aware of how automated captcha solvers work. I have also posted this in the Azulik thread.


There are two ways to automatically solve captchas: using OCR (for which complexity matters) and human solved (for which complexity is irrelevant).

The human solved ones make use of an API which distributes the captchas to people all over the world, who solve them manually and are paid for that. These are very cheap because they are solved by people living in places where that money is good money at the end of the month.

Potential errors are not relevant because the page is refreshed and you simply need to a good solving rate. Considering that this can happen continuously, a simple 50% rate is great, although it's much higher for the captchas used by RaiBlocks.

These automatic captcha solvers can also be run concurrently, therefore increasing the yield. It really is no different than a small piece of software generating proofs of work.

In fact, we might even be able to limit the generation of proofs of work by serializing them, by using a counter instead of a timestamp, and each proof of work would have to use the previous proof of work.

This would have to be combined with a registration process for the addresses that would be allowed to participate in the free distribution; for example, between dates X and Y, the users registered on this forum could send you their addresses (one per user); maybe also require a minimum number of posts per user.