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Disclosure: I own Bitcoin, Dash, and Sia, but I've sold most of my Bitcoin. I'm surprised I even have to spell this out for people, but here goes: Mining stop

Disclosure: I own Bitcoin, Dash, and Sia, but I've sold most of my Bitcoin. I'm surprised I even have to spell this out for people, but here goes: Mining stops the double spend problem just like market makers solve the liquidity problem: A little bit is great, but at scale it's divorced from the public good it provides. We don't need the amount of mining that is going on in Bitcoin right now. It's just wasted cycles because of the economics of the damn thing. What fundamental good does spreading any PoW to millions or billions of devices accomplish? Nothing. That is why cryptocurrency mining will never take over advertising. What should take over advertising (if anything) is micropayments built into the browser. Maybe with some sort of probabilistic or web-of-trust mechanism on top to prevent the bookkeeping burden from overtaking the payment amount. The problem with advertising is that it rots peoples minds and makes certain classes of goods compete on brand instead of competing on quality.

KVFinn 9y ago
>It's just wasted cycles because of the economics of the damn thing. I think a lot of people miss that mining is zero sum when over the threshold that the network needs. For example if mining hardware costs dropped by one half, people catch up and mine with twice as much computing power, the network increases the difficulty of mining by two, and the same amount of bitcoin is distributed and secured as was before the hardware innovation. You aren't mining more 'efficiently' with advances in computing power at the large scale.
- Double_a_92 9y ago
  But the trust in the system increases. By your logic we would need only one computer mining. It always takes 10 minutes (or so) anyway...
  - KVFinn 9y ago
    You do need a threshold, but I would argue the main risks to trust beyond that are in mining consolidation into powerful blocks, forks, etc.
olegkikin 9y ago
Nobody would mine bitcoin in the browser in their right mind, it's a waste of resources. You would choose one of the coins made specifically for CPU/GPU mining only, no ASICs.
- steeleduncan 9y ago
  Mining doesn't have to be a cost efficient use of cpu cycles for the person browsing for this to catch on, it just needs to be a more cost efficient use of bandwidth and server power for the entity serving the ads. Bitcoins are the consistently valuable and liquid coin, therefore it can make sense to serve bitcoin mining js.
  - mitchty 9y ago
    If this ever catches on, i have even more reason to disable all javascript while browsing on my laptop and on battery. As it is javascript is the number one reason for shit battery life, I don't want to make that even worse than the days of flash which its rapidly already become today.
    - wmurmann 9y ago
      Better off just closing your laptop then, as most sites rely heavily on JavaScript.
      - mitchty 9y ago
        Really? My choice for the "modern" web is: no battery life or no web? Faustian bargains like that aren't a great definition of progress.
    - gruez 9y ago
      until you hit SPA sites that need javascript to work.
      - mitchty 9y ago
ramshorns 9y ago
> What fundamental good does spreading any PoW to millions or billions of devices accomplish? Nothing. Well, if the owners of those devices control the mining they're doing, then it secures the network by preventing a 51% attack from any single miner with enough power. But in this case, only the website operator benefits by not having to pay for electricity.
beaner 9y ago
Advertising will never go away. You pay for cable, yet cable still has ads. Micropayments could potentially be adopted as a short-term alternative, but if it were ever to become the status quo, publishers would just start adding advertisements on top. Then we'd have a system where we both pay money directly, and also have ads, which would be worse.
- 3pt14159 9y ago
  It doesn’t take that much machine learning to identify an ad and if micro payments were built into the browser they could be trivially tuned to only award payments on non-advertisers.
  - beaner 9y ago
    This wouldn't solve the problem is payment is required up front for the content.
  - alwillis 9y ago
    You can participate with this now using Brave, a Chromium-based browser that uses cryptocurrency-based micropayments to pay for content while blocking adds: https://brave.com https://brave.com
- celticninja 9y ago
  The number one reason I dont pay for cable, but I do pay for Amazon prime video and I dont get adverts there, I assume Netflix is the same. If I was paying £50 a month for sky TV I would be annoyed at advertising being shown to me. I put up with adverts on free to air TV and am happy to pay a licence fee to the BBC for advert free television and radio. It's possible to provide a service that charges for access and doesn't show adverts as these options prove, however greedy media firms want to have their cake and to eat it.
KGIII 9y ago
Ads make content available to people with no money to spend. Restricting content to those who can pay, instead of paying by ad placement, is only going to further the divide between social classes.
- just_one_time_ 9y ago
  because the internet is free right now?

KVFinn 9y ago

>It's just wasted cycles because of the economics of the damn thing. I think a lot of people miss that mining is zero sum when over the threshold that the network needs. For example if mining hardware costs dropped by one half, people catch up and mine with twice as much computing power, the network increases the difficulty of mining by two, and the same amount of bitcoin is distributed and secured as was before the hardware innovation. You aren't mining more 'efficiently' with advances in computing power at the large scale.

Double_a_92 9y ago
But the trust in the system increases. By your logic we would need only one computer mining. It always takes 10 minutes (or so) anyway...
- KVFinn 9y ago
  You do need a threshold, but I would argue the main risks to trust beyond that are in mining consolidation into powerful blocks, forks, etc.

olegkikin 9y ago

Nobody would mine bitcoin in the browser in their right mind, it's a waste of resources. You would choose one of the coins made specifically for CPU/GPU mining only, no ASICs.

steeleduncan 9y ago
Mining doesn't have to be a cost efficient use of cpu cycles for the person browsing for this to catch on, it just needs to be a more cost efficient use of bandwidth and server power for the entity serving the ads. Bitcoins are the consistently valuable and liquid coin, therefore it can make sense to serve bitcoin mining js.
- mitchty 9y ago
  If this ever catches on, i have even more reason to disable all javascript while browsing on my laptop and on battery. As it is javascript is the number one reason for shit battery life, I don't want to make that even worse than the days of flash which its rapidly already become today.
  - wmurmann 9y ago
    Better off just closing your laptop then, as most sites rely heavily on JavaScript.
    - mitchty 9y ago
      Really? My choice for the "modern" web is: no battery life or no web? Faustian bargains like that aren't a great definition of progress.
  - gruez 9y ago
    until you hit SPA sites that need javascript to work.
    - mitchty 9y ago

ramshorns 9y ago

> What fundamental good does spreading any PoW to millions or billions of devices accomplish? Nothing. Well, if the owners of those devices control the mining they're doing, then it secures the network by preventing a 51% attack from any single miner with enough power. But in this case, only the website operator benefits by not having to pay for electricity.

beaner 9y ago

Advertising will never go away. You pay for cable, yet cable still has ads. Micropayments could potentially be adopted as a short-term alternative, but if it were ever to become the status quo, publishers would just start adding advertisements on top. Then we'd have a system where we both pay money directly, and also have ads, which would be worse.

3pt14159 9y ago
It doesn’t take that much machine learning to identify an ad and if micro payments were built into the browser they could be trivially tuned to only award payments on non-advertisers.
- beaner 9y ago
  This wouldn't solve the problem is payment is required up front for the content.
- alwillis 9y ago
  You can participate with this now using Brave, a Chromium-based browser that uses cryptocurrency-based micropayments to pay for content while blocking adds: https://brave.com https://brave.com
celticninja 9y ago
The number one reason I dont pay for cable, but I do pay for Amazon prime video and I dont get adverts there, I assume Netflix is the same. If I was paying £50 a month for sky TV I would be annoyed at advertising being shown to me. I put up with adverts on free to air TV and am happy to pay a licence fee to the BBC for advert free television and radio. It's possible to provide a service that charges for access and doesn't show adverts as these options prove, however greedy media firms want to have their cake and to eat it.

KGIII 9y ago

Ads make content available to people with no money to spend. Restricting content to those who can pay, instead of paying by ad placement, is only going to further the divide between social classes.

just_one_time_ 9y ago
because the internet is free right now?