Think of crawlers: a crawler typically makes hundreds or thousands of requests per second. The owners of the crawler then sell this data for X$, or gain X$ profit.
Proof of work adds a very small cost to each individual request, increasing the cost of crawling to a number higher than X. Because actual humans make very few requests, we don’t notice the increase in cost.
Proof of work adds a very small cost to each individual request, increasing the cost of crawling to a number higher than X. Because actual humans make very few requests, we don’t notice the increase in cost.