Oddbean new post about login | logout It seems that what you describe is a whitelist relay which may have interesting properties but probably not a good fit to act as a regular relay free of AIs.
I'm not solving captchas for a token lol that idea is older than Bitcoin it's called fatigue operator and bot operators took turns solving each other's capatchas so their bot could run when they were away. I like the model where relays handle the bans and anyone can easily spin up a relay.