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In the absence of an effective micropayment method, I could see this exchange of mining for content becoming main stream that replaces commercials. The cost to

In the absence of an effective micropayment method, I could see this exchange of mining for content becoming main stream that replaces commercials. The cost to the viewer is ultimately a few cents of electricity, without the need for a bank account information, which the content producer indirectly turns into cash.

icebraining 9y ago
The cost to the viewer is ultimately a few cents of electricity For a regular computer plugged-in to a real electricity network, maybe. For a person on battery, or trying to charge their device before going out, or on a limited power supply (e.g. small home battery supplied by solar panel, or a car charger), it's more than that.
csomar 9y ago
The problem is that mining through the browser is very inefficient. I don't have numbers but it'd probably cost an order of magnitude more, at least, to mine on the browser. And I'm talking about CPU cryptos, forget about bitcoin.
- pr0gramm 9y ago
  That may be true for Ethereum or Bitcoin, but not for Monero. The Coinhive Monero miner is about 65% as fast as a native miner would be, at least in Browsers that support WASM. Disclaimer: I wrote the Coinhive Monero miner.
  - joosters 9y ago
    How does it feel to see your code getting used worldwide... almost entirely by deceitful scum?
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - csomar 9y ago
    Thank you very much for this information. Supports for WASM looks decent. Looking into it now!
  - colejohnson66 9y ago
    Only 65%? That’s an opportunity for a 50% speedup by writing in native code. And running on the GPU would be even faster, no? What’s the protection against that?
  - bfuller 9y ago
    You get a lot of hate. But I think what you did was really cool!
- rdlecler1 9y ago
  If this became mainstream I’m sure we would find more efficient solutions.
  - qbrass 9y ago
    Someone will just package a mining ASIC with an API that lets advertisers use it directly and market it as a way to speed up web browsing. Maybe Intel will throw it on their chips as a processor extension.
kuschku 9y ago
> The cost to the viewer is ultimately a few cents of electricity At US electricity prices. At German electricity prices of 0.40$ per kWh, this is costing you a magnitude more than the site even gets.
simias 9y ago
The problem is that mining is effectively a zero-sum game (value of the underlying cryptocurrency notwithstanding). The more people mine the less each individual hash is worth. If this becomes mainstream the overall difficulty of the cryptocurrency they're mining will raise making it less rewarding. In other words you have a "micropayment" method where you can't really fix the price unless you're willing to force the user to mine for a certain amount of time before they can access the content. All I see is a good way to waste energy.
- rdlecler1 9y ago
  I’m no economist, but it seems like the millions of dollars of electricity that have gone into mining crypto currencies is transferred into the underlying value of the crypto currency. So if I know that it will take $100m of today’s money to mine crypto currency for the next year, then I would expect the total market cap of that crypto currency to rise by at least $100m with a premium for speculation and other supply demand issues. So in that sense the value of the mined currency should increase with the mining cost.
  - simias 9y ago
    It's the other way around really, the value of the crypto dictates how much money you can spend mining it and still break even. Except then the difficulty will increase and even things out. Having more miners could increase the trust in the currency and increase its value but it's not directly correlated. Mining from a random browser will almost certainly never be cost effective for the user, you're better off buying or renting dedicated hardware, mine on it and use the reward to pay for microtransactions.
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      But that is not the right question to answer. The right question is is the cost of mining crypto currencies in a browser more or less than the cost of dealing with advertising?
Nursie 9y ago
>> mining for content becoming main stream that replaces commercials Replaces? Like they'll ever give those up...
rdlecler1 9y ago
Legal uncertainty aside, I could also see an entity like Facebook running their own ICO and then using that crypto currency for micro payments and other transactions on the Facebook platform. In some ways that crypto currency would becomes the official currency of Facebook’s virtual nation state.
tyler33 9y ago
Don't worry, it is too much profitable ads than mining, and this difference increase every day
bhaak 9y ago
Crypto currencies will probably give us usable micropayments and finally enable us to pay content producer in a better way than viewing ads on their page. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-case-for-micropayments/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-case-for-micropayments/ This article by Jakob Nielsen already called for them 20 years ago and if you read it today, it doesn't look like we moved a bit considering ads on websites. The payment overhead with traditional payment options is just to big. Paypal has 30 cents per transactions IIRC? Way too much if you just want to proces a few cents or even a fraction of a cent. Systems like Flattr or Kachingle solve this in another interesting way but it's still not ideal. Crypto currencies would solve nicely this problem but of course, there needs to be easier ways of getting them and paying with them. I have no doubts that the latter will come quickly (see also the new Payment Request API). The former, we'll have to see. But I'm optimistic and would be surprised if we didn't have that within 5 years.
- anc84 9y ago
  Come back when there is a crypto currency that is not 99% scam and speculation. Volatility in value and the missing anonymity is what makes Bitcoin etc utterly useless for anything reasonable.
  - bhaak 9y ago
    Did I mention Bitcoin anywhere in my post? I deliberately talked about "crypto currencies" and didn't single out any of the existing ones that could be used for this. It's also possible that a new, not-yet-existing one could be used for this, like the Facebook coin/token mentioned elsewhere in the thread. A crypto currency backed by a real world currency would of course be best as you don't have an issue with volatility but you have to live with some volatility anyway, if you don't restrict yourself from buying from places that use the same currency as you. Anonymity is obviously not a problem for most people as you can see by all those people that use Paypal and credit cards. For those people even the level of pseudonymity that Bitcoin offers would actually be an improvement.
TeMPOraL 9y ago
> The cost to the viewer is ultimately a few cents of electricity And the cost to the society is few cents of electricity minus fraction of a cent the site gets, paid in fuel being wasted on producing that electricity. Crypto mining is a disaster. If I were an evil mastermind who wanted to deepen the energy and climate problems of the world, cryptocurrencies is what I would push for.
- ekianjo 9y ago
  Because you think fiat currencies have no associated energy consumption?
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    They do. But in management of fiat currencies, it's understood that energy expenditure is an upkeep that is to be reduced. In cryptocurrencies, on the other hand, energy use is a "feature" that's intended to grow over time. Or put differently, cryptocurrencies are trying to replace a system that's O(log n) with respect to energy with a system that's O(n^2), for questionable and mostly imaginary benefit of trustless payments.
- trophycase 9y ago
  What about the millions and millions of man hours that go into creating and distributing advertising? Surely that's also an enormous waste?
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    It is. And I speak out frequently against it. Advertising today is mostly a zero-sum game, where all the effort you put into it goes to offset the equivalent effort your competitor puts into it. Thus it forms a feedback loop of ever increasing waste. Still, this topic is not relevant to discussion about merits of cryptocurrencies.
- kbart 9y ago
  Why do you think that minor cryptocurrencies mining operations are worse in regards of wasted fuel than playing computer games, watching mindless YouTube videos, scrolling Facebook, leaving devices on when not used, lighting places 24/7 where nobody goes at night anyway etc.? We, as society, waste an enormous amount of resources anyway, I don't see how mining in browser would even dent that. Sure, these mega cryptocurrency mining stations is totally different thing I'm not talking here about.

icebraining 9y ago

The cost to the viewer is ultimately a few cents of electricity For a regular computer plugged-in to a real electricity network, maybe. For a person on battery, or trying to charge their device before going out, or on a limited power supply (e.g. small home battery supplied by solar panel, or a car charger), it's more than that.

csomar 9y ago

The problem is that mining through the browser is very inefficient. I don't have numbers but it'd probably cost an order of magnitude more, at least, to mine on the browser. And I'm talking about CPU cryptos, forget about bitcoin.

pr0gramm 9y ago
That may be true for Ethereum or Bitcoin, but not for Monero. The Coinhive Monero miner is about 65% as fast as a native miner would be, at least in Browsers that support WASM. Disclaimer: I wrote the Coinhive Monero miner.
- joosters 9y ago
  How does it feel to see your code getting used worldwide... almost entirely by deceitful scum?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- csomar 9y ago
  Thank you very much for this information. Supports for WASM looks decent. Looking into it now!
- colejohnson66 9y ago
  Only 65%? That’s an opportunity for a 50% speedup by writing in native code. And running on the GPU would be even faster, no? What’s the protection against that?
- bfuller 9y ago
  You get a lot of hate. But I think what you did was really cool!
rdlecler1 9y ago
If this became mainstream I’m sure we would find more efficient solutions.
- qbrass 9y ago
  Someone will just package a mining ASIC with an API that lets advertisers use it directly and market it as a way to speed up web browsing. Maybe Intel will throw it on their chips as a processor extension.

kuschku 9y ago

> The cost to the viewer is ultimately a few cents of electricity At US electricity prices. At German electricity prices of 0.40$ per kWh, this is costing you a magnitude more than the site even gets.

simias 9y ago

The problem is that mining is effectively a zero-sum game (value of the underlying cryptocurrency notwithstanding). The more people mine the less each individual hash is worth. If this becomes mainstream the overall difficulty of the cryptocurrency they're mining will raise making it less rewarding. In other words you have a "micropayment" method where you can't really fix the price unless you're willing to force the user to mine for a certain amount of time before they can access the content. All I see is a good way to waste energy.

rdlecler1 9y ago
I’m no economist, but it seems like the millions of dollars of electricity that have gone into mining crypto currencies is transferred into the underlying value of the crypto currency. So if I know that it will take $100m of today’s money to mine crypto currency for the next year, then I would expect the total market cap of that crypto currency to rise by at least $100m with a premium for speculation and other supply demand issues. So in that sense the value of the mined currency should increase with the mining cost.
- simias 9y ago
  It's the other way around really, the value of the crypto dictates how much money you can spend mining it and still break even. Except then the difficulty will increase and even things out. Having more miners could increase the trust in the currency and increase its value but it's not directly correlated. Mining from a random browser will almost certainly never be cost effective for the user, you're better off buying or renting dedicated hardware, mine on it and use the reward to pay for microtransactions.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    But that is not the right question to answer. The right question is is the cost of mining crypto currencies in a browser more or less than the cost of dealing with advertising?

Nursie 9y ago

>> mining for content becoming main stream that replaces commercials Replaces? Like they'll ever give those up...

rdlecler1 9y ago

Legal uncertainty aside, I could also see an entity like Facebook running their own ICO and then using that crypto currency for micro payments and other transactions on the Facebook platform. In some ways that crypto currency would becomes the official currency of Facebook’s virtual nation state.

tyler33 9y ago

Don't worry, it is too much profitable ads than mining, and this difference increase every day

bhaak 9y ago

Crypto currencies will probably give us usable micropayments and finally enable us to pay content producer in a better way than viewing ads on their page. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-case-for-micropayments/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-case-for-micropayments/ This article by Jakob Nielsen already called for them 20 years ago and if you read it today, it doesn't look like we moved a bit considering ads on websites. The payment overhead with traditional payment options is just to big. Paypal has 30 cents per transactions IIRC? Way too much if you just want to proces a few cents or even a fraction of a cent. Systems like Flattr or Kachingle solve this in another interesting way but it's still not ideal. Crypto currencies would solve nicely this problem but of course, there needs to be easier ways of getting them and paying with them. I have no doubts that the latter will come quickly (see also the new Payment Request API). The former, we'll have to see. But I'm optimistic and would be surprised if we didn't have that within 5 years.

anc84 9y ago
Come back when there is a crypto currency that is not 99% scam and speculation. Volatility in value and the missing anonymity is what makes Bitcoin etc utterly useless for anything reasonable.
- bhaak 9y ago
  Did I mention Bitcoin anywhere in my post? I deliberately talked about "crypto currencies" and didn't single out any of the existing ones that could be used for this. It's also possible that a new, not-yet-existing one could be used for this, like the Facebook coin/token mentioned elsewhere in the thread. A crypto currency backed by a real world currency would of course be best as you don't have an issue with volatility but you have to live with some volatility anyway, if you don't restrict yourself from buying from places that use the same currency as you. Anonymity is obviously not a problem for most people as you can see by all those people that use Paypal and credit cards. For those people even the level of pseudonymity that Bitcoin offers would actually be an improvement.

TeMPOraL 9y ago

> The cost to the viewer is ultimately a few cents of electricity And the cost to the society is few cents of electricity minus fraction of a cent the site gets, paid in fuel being wasted on producing that electricity. Crypto mining is a disaster. If I were an evil mastermind who wanted to deepen the energy and climate problems of the world, cryptocurrencies is what I would push for.

ekianjo 9y ago
Because you think fiat currencies have no associated energy consumption?
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  They do. But in management of fiat currencies, it's understood that energy expenditure is an upkeep that is to be reduced. In cryptocurrencies, on the other hand, energy use is a "feature" that's intended to grow over time. Or put differently, cryptocurrencies are trying to replace a system that's O(log n) with respect to energy with a system that's O(n^2), for questionable and mostly imaginary benefit of trustless payments.
trophycase 9y ago
What about the millions and millions of man hours that go into creating and distributing advertising? Surely that's also an enormous waste?
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  It is. And I speak out frequently against it. Advertising today is mostly a zero-sum game, where all the effort you put into it goes to offset the equivalent effort your competitor puts into it. Thus it forms a feedback loop of ever increasing waste. Still, this topic is not relevant to discussion about merits of cryptocurrencies.
kbart 9y ago
Why do you think that minor cryptocurrencies mining operations are worse in regards of wasted fuel than playing computer games, watching mindless YouTube videos, scrolling Facebook, leaving devices on when not used, lighting places 24/7 where nobody goes at night anyway etc.? We, as society, waste an enormous amount of resources anyway, I don't see how mining in browser would even dent that. Sure, these mega cryptocurrency mining stations is totally different thing I'm not talking here about.