The first one has obvious flaws which you kinda pointed out yourself.
The second one is spot on. The captcha is a bit ridiculous. Open the trade page like 5 times, and it'll trigger or something like that. It needs to be extended. It's extremely tedious and annoying and is WAY overkill for fighting against scripters.
Open the trade page, check the lowest price of a resource, create an offer and post it, goes back to the trade page, open another resouce, CAPTCHA.