equix

PoW is useful in far more situations than PoS. A derivative of RandomX is now used to protect TOR too (Equi-X). https://github.com/tevador/equix/blob/master/devlog.md

From https://github.com/tevador/equix/blob/master/devlog.md > The service would give the request a priority value based on the "difficulty" of the puzzle solution. Seems like single clients could increase the difficulty to higher than what the bot net would do (so it gets priority), and hence get access. Operators of the bot net would probably hard code one value as the difficulty, and it would be lower than what you could typically set on consumer hardware. Maybe user agents could even do this increase automatically?

A good explanation of the algorithm is here: https://github.com/tevador/equix/blob/master/devlog.md > they are talking about 1 minute solve times once a DDOS is detected. The point of this is to prevent an existing easy DoS attack (introduction flooding) into a partial outage/slow down. It's an incremental improvement on a hard problem.

Really interesting! Digging into the proposal [1]: > make it harder for attackers to overload the service with introduction request > We hope that this proposal can help us defend against the script-kiddie attacker and small botnets. Sets expectations: does not counter large botnets. > We hope that this proposal will allow the motivated user to always connect A user who really wants to connect can get through durring a DoS attack, but it may still take work. Interesting choice of PoW algorithm: https://github.com/tevador/equix > Hence, instead of forcing clients to go below a static target like in Bitcoin to be successful, we ask clients to "bid" using their PoW effort. Effectively, a client gets higher priority the higher effort they put into their proof-of-work. This is similar to how proof-of-stake works but instead of staking coin