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Today I read that The Pirate Bay tested this new form of monetization (running a miner in you browser). I thought that might solve website monetization finally.

• banku_brougham 9y ago
  better than ads and trackers, i agree. but shortly we'll be getting all three.
  • sametmax 9y ago
    And this is why we can't have nice things.
• narrowtux 9y ago
  I don't know. If you run those on a laptop you pretty much kill battery life, same thing with phones.
  • r3bl 9y ago
    If HTML5's battery API ever became a thing, this issue could be solved without any user interaction.
    • wrinkl3 9y ago
      Can you elaborate how?
      • sergiotapia 9y ago
        "is this user on a mobile device or laptop? Don't mine."
        • wrinkl3 9y ago
          Meh, then you're back to the same dilemma ads have: you have to convince the users to visit your page from a desktop PC as much as possible. And that usually means making the mobile experience as bad as possible. Which the users won't like for fairly obvious reasons.
        • xg15 9y ago
          Why would a miner want to implement that?
          • tentaTherapist 9y ago
            So that people don't get angry?
            • tommorris 9y ago
              Pretty sure user anger didn't stop the prevalence of pop-up Punch The Monkey adverts. The massive rise in adblocking forced the ad industry to stop being quite so obnoxious. So, yeah, relying on advertisers to not piss off users is a bit much given their business model relies on interrupting your attention.
        • r3bl 9y ago
          No, not even that. More like: "Is this user's battery below 50% and discharging? If not, he'll probably not even notice this."
        • seanwilson 9y ago
          Then users would just set their machine to say they're on a slow laptop with 1% battery left.
    • cpeterso 9y ago
      I would not expect miners to voluntarily stop mining just because the user agent reports low battery. Any miners that care about mobile users could check the user agent string and throttle mining.
      • TeMPOraL 9y ago
        If the battery API ever becomes a thing, the first thing I will do is to hack the browser to perpetually report an almost-dying battery. Similarly, if there ever comes a standard for network link quality, I'll make my browser report I'm on a 56k modem. The reason is simple: whatever cruft the site decides to only serve to high-end users is the cruft I'm very much not interested in seeing. And because I'm definitely not alone in this thinking, those APIs will be failures for anything other than getting additional bits for tracking and profiling people.
        • lagadu 9y ago
          It'd be fine. You would do that, I would do that and most people here would do that. The vast majority of users would not, it's just like adblockers: only a minority uses them.
• BatFastard 9y ago
  I agree that this is a possible solution to ads issues.
• gkya 9y ago
  I'd rather pay with my wallet than with my battery. And I'll pay only what I buy. Lock me out if I don't pay, or tell me to GTFO, and I'm totally fine with it, but you can't pick my hypotethical-pocket because I opened up your page. This is like charging window-shoppers. And like a sibling comment says, if this catches on, most web sites will do both, i.e. ads + client-side mining. One nice day publishing industry will no longer be an industry but a group of non-profits, which won't have to sell stuff, and publish way more objective and high-quality stuff. edit: grammar
  • tamonesto 9y ago
    yeah right..
    • yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
      If you have some criticism, please share with the class. As it is, I can't even tell what you're being dismissive of.
      • nurettin 9y ago
        Throwaway account means just that. No point in replying to them. They don't log back in to reply to you. They just waste space with random comments and get downvoted to deletion. HN accepts and welcomes this behavior in exchange for simpler account creation process.
  • sillysaurus3 9y ago
    I'd argue that ads already pick your pocket just for window shopping the page. There's no such thing as Adblock for video streams on Twitch anymore; the ads are burned into the stream, so you can't block them. (Hopefully YouTube won't switch to the same tech.) Is that picking your pocket just for watching a video steam? If not, why is a video steam materially different from consuming a website?
    • Tharre 9y ago
• IncRnd 9y ago
  That's like saying that regular ad posters on the wall, when someone reads them, are okay to borrow your coat, shoes, and cell phone while you stay in that room.
• whatusername 9y ago
  Here was a HN post about it over 6 years ago. It's not new. (noting it was bitcoin and not something like Monero) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2566365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2566365
• curun1r 9y ago
  Ugh...no. The carbon footprint of cryptocurrencies is already borderline-unconscionable, and that's with purpose-built hardware that achieves efficiency beyond what consumer-grade equipment can. Moving mining onto consumer hardware and implementing it in JavaScript is a huge step backwards.
  • thinkloop 9y ago
    The idea that mining is a waste is a bit strange to me - of course it is a waste, that is the genius insight of it all. Waste is the most powerful thing, it is pure cost, the hardest thing to do, raw sacrifice. There are no tricks or shortcuts to over-taking the blockchain, just pure cost and waste. If the proof-of-work had value and could be sold, it would make the network less safe, and less predictable, subject to the whims of the market for its output, and able to fund its attackers while they attack. Proof-of-work is a nice way of saying proof-of-waste. There are other types of consensus mechanisms, like proof-of-stake, that are much more energy efficient, with their own set of pros and cons. They should, and will, exist; but there will still always be at least one proof-of-waste blockchain. Waste is the gold-standard of expense. The environment issue is a societal one. We need to move to clean energy, and we are.
    • aoeusnth1 9y ago
      Two quibbles I have with this argument: 1. PoW based on waste which has massive negative externalities is abusive. Power generation generally has large negative externalities. Bitcoin kills. 2. PoS is just another type of PoW - people will compete to earn the PoS rewards up until they are "burning" 0.99 worth of potential ETH they could have earned (with stocks or bonds for example) for every 1 ETH they earn through PoW. The difference is, PoS has nearly 0 negative externalities and is funded entirely through capital which was created out of thin air, namely, ETH. The capital required to fund BTC's PoW comes externally. So switching to PoW is a capital-creating act and naturally increases the value of the currency & network.
      • rhaps0dy 9y ago
        Typo, I believe: switching to PoS is a capital-creating act, not PoW! PoW is disgusting.
• flashman 9y ago
  Website owners are free to attempt this business model. I am free to choose what code runs on my machine. Every business model has trade-offs, and no model guarantees income.
  • chii 9y ago
    There's one model that guarantees income: the subscription model.
    • timv 9y ago
      Only if you can guarantee that someone subscribes.
      • pdkl95 9y ago
        You simply need to provide a product that has value. If nobody is subscribing, that might be a message that your product isn't actually worth anything.
        • TeMPOraL 9y ago
          That's exactly why ads are so popular on-line. With them, it's trivial to waste a bit of time of other people with shitty non-product, and earn some money in the process. The same thing wouldn't fly with subscriptions; you'd actually have to create something valuable.
        • LaGrange 9y ago
          Or people who would subscribe it are unable to afford the monetary cost. That doesn't mean it doesn't have value. Wouldn't justify wasting energy and compromising user privacy, as the current model does, but that's why capitalism has to go.
• xg15 9y ago
  > And what do I see here? That before it even started people are fighting it. Seems to me, before it even started, people started abusing it. (e.g. by just keeping it running through the whole session) If you want to invent some acceptable method of compensation for the web, you should make sure that both sides have power to negotiate a fair price. With ads and tracking, it seems to be all or nothing: Either unreasonably high prices (perpetual tracking and potential malware for a 5 minute article) or unreasonably low (use an adblocker and get it free) The "proof of work" payment method seems to have the same problem.
• outoftacos 9y ago
  "Solution" wow, just step back a second here, I never signed up for advertisements AT ALL, much less background CPU miners for shady schemes. Solution is the last word to use, there is no problem first off and malware is not how you would solve this fantasy of a "problem".
  • phailhaus 9y ago
    You have to remember that you're not entitled to their server resources. If you are not okay with a CPU miner, then don't use their site. I'm okay with this as long as they are 100% transparent about their monetization scheme.
    • chii 9y ago
      > don't use their site Or, use their site, but the end user always dictate the code that runs on their own machine. If the server don't wish for a user to skimp the mining, make them submit the proof of work result first, then serve the content.
    • Nursie 9y ago
      I'm pretty sure I'm entitled to request content, and my machine can render it however it likes. They make the choice whether to serve it or not.
      • phailhaus 9y ago
        Yes, that's exactly what I've been saying. If the user refuses to run the miner, don't serve the content. It's the exact same with ad blockers.
      • rootlocus 9y ago
        > my machine can render it however it likes The cost isn't what hardware does the most work. It's what time was spent creating the content. Of course they have the choice whether to serve it or not, but don't mistake the hours put into writing an article with the milliseconds used to serve a request. You're not (not) paying for the latter.
• mintplant 9y ago
  Sorry, no, you can't burn my CPU cycles and drain my battery for money. Full stop, end of story, thanks for playing, etc, etc. I still own my computer, and I couldn't care less about your innovative new business model. Just, no.
  • phailhaus 9y ago
    Yeah but you're not entitled to use their server's resources for free. If you're not okay with them running a miner while you use their site, don't use their site. I'm okay with this approach as long as they are transparent about it.
    • wdr1 9y ago
      It seems equivalent to ad blocking.
      • phailhaus 9y ago
        Yeah, and there are sites which will prevent you from viewing their content if you have an ad blocker enabled. That's their prerogative.
        • BatFastard 9y ago
          I would love to have the option to pay with CPU cycles so that I dont have to subscribe.
    • wtallis 9y ago
      > If you're not okay with them running a miner while you use their site, don't use their site. The onus is on the site to not serve up content if they don't trust that I'm running their code as-is at full speed. Nothing about the design of the Web says that servers should trust unauthenticated clients or that clients should prioritize the server's wishes over those of the user. Server operators have no standing to complain when a user agent ignores the server's request for the user agent to do something that is against the user's interests.
• partiallypro 9y ago
  I'm not completely against it, so long as the content provider is transparent about it and as long as it is only active while I am browsing their site and isn't some malware like thing that turns my machine into a zombie. I feel like it would be easy to hijack and hide in a window process though so it just always runs when your browser is running. Even if Pirate Bay, et al doesn't do that...someone will or already has.
• PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  > We still have to figure out stuff like battery draining on mobile "Figure out" how? If mining didn't eat lots of power and CPU cycles, it would be useless as proof-of-work and BitCoin couldn't exist. It is literally impossible to do useful amounts of mining in a way that doesn't slow down the mining device and drain its battery.
• jabot 9y ago
  The gnu taler project might be a better solution, if it reaches adoption. One use case that they have in their demo is micro payments to access web sites: https://demo.taler.net/en/ https://demo.taler.net/en/
• whipoodle 9y ago
  > And what do I see here? That before it even started people are fighting it. Ha, I really dig the implication that people are impetuous brats for not wanting this to run on their computers. The audacity..!