Assume you have a botnet and a beefy central node. Why couldn't you spoof speed ability to ability of botnet, offload PoW to botnet when requested and return result through central node? Central node would do DB lookup.
Great question!! Each client's DB is linked to it's WalletID and each would be at least 8Gb each, so this central node would have to have to generate and store this database for each wallet. Of course they could have lots of 256gb+ drives storing 32 databases each or even racks of SSDs... the drawback is that to use the entire botnet would require an investment of tens of thousands of Gb of fast storage... and each botnet clients would farm pennies worth Worldo every week.
Short answer, they wouldn't bother...
Botnets work so effectively because they are free, you set them to work and forget about them. The addition of a simple idea to slow them down is enough for the controllers to just look for an easier coin to exploit.
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