• admiralteal@kbin.social
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    9 months ago

    Nah bro, you are.

    It’s ALSO possible to generate virtual phone numbers for a small cost.

    Using a cryptographic PoW is a different small cost.

    Either way, it only takes a small cost to prevent mass bot registration.

    You’re treating processing power and time as if it is 100% free just because it can be done in a VM. But it doesn’t matter if it is a VM. It is still going to require at least some certain threshold of processor time, and that processor time has a real cost. For the kind of place that can just spin up thousands of VMs and use it to do massive bot registration… they could just be mining bitcoins instead.