Open pastebin, no login, paste text, get a link. That is the whole appeal, and it is also why every anonymous paste service turns into a dumping ground. Bots script the post endpoint and fire off thousands of spam links, phishing kits, leaked credential lists, malware config. The usual fix is to make the thing less anonymous: force an account, bolt on reCAPTCHA, rate-limit by IP. Every one of those punishes the honest one-off user to slow down a bot that just rotates IPs anyway.
I wanted a paste service that stayed anonymous and one-click but still cost a spammer something real. So the price of posting is not an account. It is energy. You either burn a little CPU (proof of work, free) or you pay 10 sats over Lightning. A human posting one snippet never notices. A bot posting ten thousand notices real fast.
Here is the whole flow against the live service at paste.powforge.dev. Every curl below is real and runs today.
The free path: prove work
Grab a challenge first.
