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I know people will say this is inefficient, but based on the current climate I think this may have potential if: 1. The service provider (Coinhive) used not ju

I know people will say this is inefficient, but based on the current climate I think this may have potential if: 1. The service provider (Coinhive) used not just BTC but all kinds of cryptocurrency 2. they make sure they switch over to the most lucrative cryptocurrency at the moment in realtime 3. makes sure the user (In this case thepiratebay) can cash out immediately, as in every day. In this case, mining as a business model may make sense. I think it's impressive that they built something like this to begin with.

aaron-lebo 9y ago
BTC isn't made to be mined on consumer machines and it hasn't been profitable for like 6-7 years. You are basically heating the planet for nothing. Unless the person has a decent GPU and the currency supports that, it's still worthless, but it's a lot of trouble (and disrespectful to unaware users). But you're talking about a business plan that relies on new, worthless, speculative currencies to come and go for the next decade. Does anyone benefit from that? Does that sound stable?
- cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
  That's why i said there should be a way to cash out immediately. Of course if you were actually to do something like this, it will require a lot of thought, and I personally won't touch anything like this because I don't believe in junk currencies and would rather spend my time working on something meaningful. But I think the idea itself is interesting and worth thinking about instead of just discounting it as "not efficient".
  - IncRnd 9y ago
    It is well thought out. Today, bitcoin is mined on ASICs. GPUs and CPUs do not provide enough processing power, since they are not efficient at this algorithm in comparison to ASICs that are purpose made for this algorithm.
    - cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
      This brings us back to my point 1 and 2. I don't know why people keep telling me about Bitcoin when the whole point of my comment was about non-bitcoin cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin mining is not economical anymore for minor miners, which is why we have mining pools, but there are other cryptocurencies that are just starting out and need miners. Not sure if you're aware but everytime a new promising altcoin starts out GPU mining does work for a bit in the early days. And then it doesn't. My point was if you could identify these promising altcoins during the early stages it may make sense. I said nothing about using Bitcoin to do this.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  > BTC isn't made to be mined on consumer machines That's exactly what it was made for. But the creators had the foresight to adjust the difficulty factor automatically as the hashrate - inevitably - would increase and this means that even though the speed with which GPU, FPGA and later ASIC based mining probably wasn't foreseen it still managed to remain relevant.
- BayesStreet 9y ago
  This was my first thought, even just speaking economically there's no way the revenue generated for tpb is greater than the electricity it's costing the victim. Sure with GPUs this might change but JS is not ideal for this at the moment.
- dannyw 9y ago
  They're mining Monero, not bitcoin.
dzhiurgis 9y ago
They way TPB seems to currently work is that there are thousands of clone sites operated by individuals, who find whatever way to earn money while hosting on something like Cloudflare. They are connect to some sort of centralised server or perhaps just scrap the DHT themselves. For such operators, having alternative source of income is quite awesome. The problem is that they do not interact long with website, someone like Facebook would be much more useful.
- cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
  Interesting, i honestly had no idea. Do you have a source for this? Would love to learn more about how these people operate in a distributed manner

aaron-lebo 9y ago

BTC isn't made to be mined on consumer machines and it hasn't been profitable for like 6-7 years. You are basically heating the planet for nothing. Unless the person has a decent GPU and the currency supports that, it's still worthless, but it's a lot of trouble (and disrespectful to unaware users). But you're talking about a business plan that relies on new, worthless, speculative currencies to come and go for the next decade. Does anyone benefit from that? Does that sound stable?

cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
That's why i said there should be a way to cash out immediately. Of course if you were actually to do something like this, it will require a lot of thought, and I personally won't touch anything like this because I don't believe in junk currencies and would rather spend my time working on something meaningful. But I think the idea itself is interesting and worth thinking about instead of just discounting it as "not efficient".
- IncRnd 9y ago
  It is well thought out. Today, bitcoin is mined on ASICs. GPUs and CPUs do not provide enough processing power, since they are not efficient at this algorithm in comparison to ASICs that are purpose made for this algorithm.
  - cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
    This brings us back to my point 1 and 2. I don't know why people keep telling me about Bitcoin when the whole point of my comment was about non-bitcoin cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin mining is not economical anymore for minor miners, which is why we have mining pools, but there are other cryptocurencies that are just starting out and need miners. Not sure if you're aware but everytime a new promising altcoin starts out GPU mining does work for a bit in the early days. And then it doesn't. My point was if you could identify these promising altcoins during the early stages it may make sense. I said nothing about using Bitcoin to do this.
jacquesm 9y ago
> BTC isn't made to be mined on consumer machines That's exactly what it was made for. But the creators had the foresight to adjust the difficulty factor automatically as the hashrate - inevitably - would increase and this means that even though the speed with which GPU, FPGA and later ASIC based mining probably wasn't foreseen it still managed to remain relevant.
BayesStreet 9y ago
This was my first thought, even just speaking economically there's no way the revenue generated for tpb is greater than the electricity it's costing the victim. Sure with GPUs this might change but JS is not ideal for this at the moment.
dannyw 9y ago
They're mining Monero, not bitcoin.

dzhiurgis 9y ago

They way TPB seems to currently work is that there are thousands of clone sites operated by individuals, who find whatever way to earn money while hosting on something like Cloudflare. They are connect to some sort of centralised server or perhaps just scrap the DHT themselves. For such operators, having alternative source of income is quite awesome. The problem is that they do not interact long with website, someone like Facebook would be much more useful.

cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
Interesting, i honestly had no idea. Do you have a source for this? Would love to learn more about how these people operate in a distributed manner