Quite the contrary. Botnets are only a threat to CPU mined shitcoins.
ASIC's being single purpose hardware millions of times faster than a CPU means botnets using stolen electricity can't compete.
Discussion
You can’t both have someone that can resist censorship and posting on it for free.
You either require some proof of payment or you delegate to someone else the decision of what you should see.
If I have to delegate it to someone else why not just choose a company that has a certain level of public scrutiny rather than some random people on the internet I find amusing?
If we go with some sort of payment, zaps to other people can be faked.
So it’s either zaps to each recipient or PoW.
PoW is unbalanced and ultimately an unworkable solution due to attackers having more resources than ordinary battery limited mobile users.
People will waste time implementing this. It will seem to work for a while. Then a malicious attacker will bypass it with ease at no cost to themselves.
PoW doesn’t need to be done in your phone.
You can pay someone else to do that, or have your own PoW rig at home do it for your phone.
I’m not talking about doing a billion hashes on a phone battery.
If that’s the proposal I agree it makes no sense.
That doesn’t mean abandoning PoW
OK you're right. If you're talking about renting time from the fastest ASIC that's actually an unfakeable cost. That would be a meaningful rate limiter!