All the ways congestion controls are implemented on the web lead to a cognitively infantilizing UX, privacy violations, and even "skynet" enabling[1] (hyperbolic but nothing stopping it from happening).

"Are you really human? What's: 3 x 9"

"Can you click on images of buses?, hmmmm don't believe you're human still, can you click images of stores, hmmm now bikes, hmmm now vehicles, oh I didn't mean all vehicles I just meant autos and not motorcycles, here quick copy this token, oh it expired? Too bad. How about you click on images of buses for me..."

"Sorry, browsers that protect your privacy and location aren't allowed. We only allow users who are willing to deanonymize themselves."

"Well we all know /those people/ who come /that place/ are antisocial users"

"Here's your IP addresses back. Oh yeah, sorry about blacklisting them"

This is a comment about the meta issue Troy faces. If costs are rubegoldberg'ed to create a facade of "free", it's not actually free (even if user data isn't being sold). e.g. A median-wage (10e3USD/year) world worker spending 20 seconds solving a captcha has an opportunity cost of 0.03USD[2]. Further more, having to solve congestion issues by implementing requirements to use closed/inaccessible (credit cards) poorly programmable, sucks too. Additionally, if a congestion solution is ("I'd rather low-demand users have free access and high-demand users have expensive access) isn't solved by having a flat rate (which a "keep it low cost, mantra is incentivized to keep low"). There is market demand for: If your demands on my service are x, I'll give you back the $3.50 but if you consume y resources You have to pay Z.

Wouldn't it be great if there was a way machines could own money, send it over a layer-2 network, that was open, cheaper than credit cards, faster than L1 bitcoin, and get your money refunded if you didn't demand excessive server resources, all while not using game-able "good users come from here" privacy violating algos?

This is why micropayment using layer-2 bitcoin on the Lightning Network has significantly-valuable, latent, economic-coordination implications. Micropayments aren't about paying for 1/1000 of a peanut. They're about obviating all the engineering, social, product costs dealt with dealing with Marginal Value, Marginal Cost issues. BAD: The marginal cost of anti-DoS counter measures can always be above the marginal value of deploying them ("listen folks it costs to much to keep this service running, we'll have to shut it down". UNSTOPPABLE: If a price is put on service requests (Services on Demand)[3] the marginal value will never be below the marginal cost ("I can keep this AED locator map service running because I know a spamming request will incur costs above my production costs").

In a future where L2 Bitcoin payment/Lightning client infrastructure is prevalent, gone will be the days of annoying, productivity-draining captchas, attribute-discriminating access. Troy could charged a 0.01USD "bond" payment for a request (Which he could give back fast and costlessly to a low-demand user). Meaning the 14e3/min requests for 3 hours would have required the high-demand user a payment of $25,000USD[4].\

0.01USD refundable payment for honest users.

$25,000 USD penalty for high-demand "spammer"

[1] https://i.redd.it/pb5nggw3rulz.jpg

[2] 20/60/60 * 5

[3] https://medium.com/@soddiraju/the-not-so-micro-potential-for...

[4] 14e3 * .01 * 60 * 3