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Actually, why is this not a potential legitimate business model? I let you stream content for free and you let me mine cryto-coins with your spare CPU cycles w
by sumitgt 9y ago
Actually, why is this not a potential legitimate business model?
I let you stream content for free and you let me mine cryto-coins with your spare CPU cycles while you watch. Isn't that better for people who don't like all the tracking by ads?
- hellbanner 9y agoInteresting, you should apply to YC 2018!
- damnstraight 9y agoIt only really makes sense with browser-level cpu scheduling. Otherwise there's no real way to throttle the amount of cpu these bitcoin miners take from you. Without that, I think people are unlikely to be sympathetic and they'll be snagged by ad blockers rapidly: consent is the cornerstone of products people like.
- darawk 9y agoIt's possible to throttle. Perform n hashes, wait 100ms, repeat.
- seandougall 9y agoCertainly it's possible for the script author to throttle. Not so much for the web site visitor.
- jopsen 9y agoI hope it's just a matter of time before browsers start to throttle sites... Or maybe search rankings will be affected by CPU usage, and bandwidth.
- flukus 9y agoChrome has added throttling for inactive tabs. The problem is this is an active tab open for long stretches of time doing a somewhat cpu intensive task, so throttling isn't an option. I also doubt that be too adversely affected by slipping down the search rankings in this case.
- hubcaps 9y agoBandwidth and loads time already do play a part in search rankings, at least with Google.
- swsieber 9y agoWhich is a lot easier toeasure than long running CPU usage unfortunately (at least not without privacy concerns - e.g. getting real world data from users)
- CoryHallpdp11 9y agoadblock-nocoin-list https://github.com/hoshsadiq/adblock-nocoin-list/ https://github.com/hoshsadiq/adblock-nocoin-list/
- reecree 9y agoThis is great! Thanks!
- Kiro 9y agoWhy would they block miner.pr0gramm.com, which is only used in one specific place (the pr0gramm site itself) where you need to explicitly press a start button to mine?
- zdkl 9y ago"More than $BIGNUM entries? These guys know what they're doing!"
- Kiro 9y agoMy point is that it's clear that you mine when you use their miner. You get premium points on the website as a reward. How is that shady? I think it's a perfect use case of where a web miner makes sense as an alternative monetization method.
- crooked-v 9y agoMining in Javascript will get you less than the infrastructure costs to provide the videos, let alone replacing ad revenue.
- rootsudo 9y agoNot if it's free and distributed worldwide. 99% of people don't even know what these coins are, regardless of what happens in the background when a computer requests content on a server. I see it alongside ads.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rhizome 9y agoNo matter how many browsers are working on it?
- edmccard 9y ago"We lose money on every sale, but we make it up in volume!"
- tambienben 9y agoIf were talking about new monitisation schemes, can we not entertain the thought of using newer technologies better suited to streaming at scale? I'm thinking of IPFS in particular, but there are probably other solutions as well.
- jdavis703 9y agoSuch as WebRTC.
- cptskippy 9y agoWhat about a clever webgl shader to leverage the GPU?
- maxerickson 9y agoWhich coin is worth mining on a CPU at all?
- ringaroundthetx 9y agoMonero? Existing botnets earn $50,000/day mining on people's computers at night while finding ways to spread to additional ones. A single computer earns pennies, a couple hundred thousand earn way more.
- chii 9y agoA customer base of hundreds thousands doing streaming will cost you way more than $50k/day.
- KGIII 9y agoIt doesn't have to completely cover the costs, only offset it some and be used in conjunction with other income generation methods. Personally, I don't mind it so long as it is both fully disclosed and the ramifications fully explained - both in an accessible manner to a layperson. So long as they do that, I'm okay with it. I'm more okay with it if they give the user a simple means to opt out in a meaningful fashion. Now, chances are exactly none of those conditions will be met in the real world. But, in principle, I am okay with it.
- flukus 9y agoUnless you just package it and let youtube do the actual streaming. Imagine creating "cat-videos.com" and embedding all the youtube videos into the site but providing a better UI for browsing them.
- chii 9y agoBut you'd get both ads and mining. The point of mining was to get rid of ads!
- yuhong 9y ago
- rmrfrmrf 9y agoIt is, but the difference here is that the contracted developer added it to mine coins for themselves.
- jaxn 9y agoThat seems likely to me too, but did the article say that? Or is there another source?
- rmrfrmrf 9y agoIn the article: > "Upon reviewing our products and code, the HTML comments shown in the screenshot that are referencing newrelic were not injected by New Relic's agents. It appears they were added to the website by its developers." > [Coin Hive] did confirm to us, however, that the email address used to set up the account was a personal one, and was not an official CBS email address, further suggesting malicious activity.
- jaxn 9y agoYeah, it was obvious it was never NewRelic. But it is not obvious if it was a contractor, and employee, or someone who gained access through other means.
- ruytlm 9y agoIt makes sense while the coins have value; I wonder what value they would retain if every website started doing this. Also, I question whether it's a sensible use of electricity on the whole.
- lurker456 9y agoI hate it being done without informed consent. It's also a huge waste of electricity. On the plus side it could lead to micropayment funded instead of ad-funded sites.
- ceejayoz 9y agoDoing it on my laptop probably means I won't even finish the episode before I run out of batteries.
- pharrington 9y agoThese aren't free streaming services, and there was no disclosure, let alone consent, about the mining. edit: And CBS most likely never ordained the mining to begin with.
- plandis 9y agoYou pay us in electricity draw we didn't tell you about is a good business model?
- dexterdog 9y agoDo people complain about the electricity draw when they're hosting a bunch of bloated flash?
- IncRnd 9y agoYes. That's why iOS doesn't have flash.
- pocketsquare2 9y agoSee also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivocation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivocation
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- stwrong 9y agoIt is a business model. VPN service windscribe offers free Pro service (apparently) if you let it mine certain threshold of coins on your browser.
- Flott 9y agoNot all computer are built to do heavy computing. My poor Mac mini would probably melt after a few minutes of mining.
- ransom1538 9y agoiphones are a much better vector.
- phjesusthatguy3 9y agothe only in-browser miner I've seen sucked up CPU whether it was spare or not.
- indiv0 9y agoOn a similar note, I wonder how much money the Chinese government could make if they used the method they used to DDoS Github [0], but instead to load crypto-coin mining JavaScript onto every Baidu user's computer? Then again, that seems like one of the fastest ways to make the average citizen actually angry at the Great Firewall. [0]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/massive-denial-of-service-attack-on-github-tied-to-chinese-government/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/massi...
- labster 9y agoThe Chinese government is working hard to decrease pollution, not add additional stress on the power grid. Incentives change when you're the one responsible for all the externalities.
- duskwuff 9y agoThe GFW works both ways. That attack injected code into Chinese browsers viewing sites outside the GFW, but it could just as easily inject code into browsers outside the GFW viewing Chinese sites...
- schwede 9y agoIt might be okay if it was clearly explained and legit.
- dawnerd 9y agoWhose to say it's spare cycles? How does the site know I'm not watching something in a tiny window while doing work?
- jiggunjer 9y agoOr watching full-screen while a script does the work.
- beedogs 9y agoYou know what's even better than that? Downloading the 1080p torrent off TPB.
- icanhackit 9y ago> why is this not a potential legitimate business model? I was thinking the same thing the other day when I first heard about it. One of the main issues with existing subscription models is that some people only want to consume a small fraction of what is available from a service provider (news, music, video etc) yet have to pay a not-insignificant fee for access to everything. A good example would be the latest Star Trek series only being available in the US via CBS All Access (thankful that I'm in a country where it'll be available on Netflix). If I could lease out my CPU for a real-time exchange of services, that'd suit me just fine. I already have accounts with an energy provider and ISP, so it's one fewer monetary relationship I need to worry about. You could be asked on a per view basis, so by default all sites are blocked and need to ask for the exchange to be approved. You could also white-list trusted sites, or for a set period approve all requests not unlike a software firewall e.g. Little Snitch paired with an ad-blocker. This is something the W3C should standardise at the browser level so it's not inefficient and works across different browsers effectively. It could potentially save journalism and other business models that don't jive well with existing subscription/payment structures.
- wolco 9y agoRunning this at full speed will turn on your fan on and having this running could damage or limit the life of your computer. It's like driving for uber where in the end you pay more for repairs than you would in salary.
- icanhackit 9y agoAt the end of my post I suggested it be standardised at the browser level for this purpose. Just because the implementation sucks now doesn't mean it has to always suck.
- wolco 9y agoIt is a non scalable model. The more people who use this the greater the rating for mining. Currently it takes 5.5 billion hashes to meet the min payment for coinhive. At full power you might get 30h/s per person on a desktop or 15h/s on a phone. If you had 10000 mobile visitors who came everyday and stayed 1 minute it would take 10000 days to get min payout: 1/2 a monero coin so about 40/50 dollars. I don't see how this will replace advertising where one affilate sale could replace this income.
- rdiddly 9y agoThere needs to be consent on both sides, for it to enter the realm of legitimacy.
- kuschku 9y agoSo, you cut my phone’s battery runtime to nothing, cost me 10 to 100x more than you get yourself in electricity (German electricity prices are north of 0.40$ per kWh), and with a few dozen tabs my system crashes? No thanks.
- simias 9y agoGiven the difficulty of mining any worthwhile cryptocurrency these days (even using GPU farms instead of a web browser running on a tablet or underpowered laptop) I doubt it'd generate enough revenue to make up for the loss of ads or other micropayment options. Furthermore you can't even fix the price of the payment since you're at the mercy of the hash difficulty and the cryptocurrency value. Doesn't seem like a very good business model to me.
- Nursie 9y agoWell at the moment, likely because people aren't being told about it...
- merkaloid 9y agoBecause if this becomes mainstream, people will come to know what crypto currency and mining is and wonder why arent they mining it themselves (more effectively so using native clients instead of shitty js miners) instead of giving them to others in exchange for content they were getting anyway with adblock. Greed basically.
- cesarb 9y ago> spare CPU cycles "Spare CPU cycles" were only a thing back in the 90's, when CPUs ran at a fixed frequency, and it didn't make much difference whether it was running useful code or waiting in the idle loop. Nowadays, the frequency and voltage vary depending on whether the CPU is being used or not, so instead of "spare cycles" doing nothing the CPU powers itself down.