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Making a case for JavaScript, in-browser Mining
- afeezaziz 9y agoI think the best use case is would be for non-profit that depend on donations like Wikipedia or perhaps video streaming websites like Youtube(consumed using Desktop).
- imtringued 9y agoMaybe youtube could secretly encode keyframes in your browser.
- ddebernardy 9y agoPlease no, the carbon footprint is just too high: https://www.wired.com/story/bitcoin-mining-guzzles-energyand-its-carbon-footprint-just-keeps-growing/ https://www.wired.com/story/bitcoin-mining-guzzles-energyand...
- loverofthings 9y agoCompared to heating and cooling, and a bunch of other stuff it is negligible. I guess you could complain about the usefulness of mining. Well, people do a bunch of useless stuff that has magnitudes bigger carbon footprint than mining. Let's not optimize things that are insignificant.
- pavlov 9y agoIt's not insignificant. Bitcoin mining already consumes as much energy annually as Denmark – that means the entire country, heating, cooling, industry, everything: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/bitcoins-insane-energy-consumption-explained/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/bitcoins-insane-...
- saint_fiasco 9y agoI don't have a good intuition for that kind of heterogeneous comparison. Can it be compared with other Internet services? How much electricity does Facebook consume, for example? What about internet advertisements?
- pavlov 9y agoThat's a really good question. I don't have the answer but I'd like to know too.
- wor3q 9y agoIt's 5 times what USA use on christmas lights: https://phys.org/news/2015-12-christmas-energy-entire-countries.html https://phys.org/news/2015-12-christmas-energy-entire-countr... Or 3,5 times what Amazon US-East cluster consumes: https://datacenterfrontier.com/amazon-approaches-1-gigawatt-of-cloud-capacity-in-virginia/ https://datacenterfrontier.com/amazon-approaches-1-gigawatt-...
- ddebernardy 9y agoExactly. What more, it "only" consumes as much energy annually as a whole country because the bulk of the mining is currently done using specialized hardware. If websites begin to crowdsource mining on their visitors' PCs using JavaScript, the energy consumption will be even higher.
- wor3q 9y agoDenmark has 5M people and average temps between 0 and 17C. That means little heating and no ac. 32tWh/yr means roughly 3,6GW, which is output of 1-2 average nuclear power plants.
- pavlov 9y agoThe cost of building a nuclear reactor in the West is in the ballpark of $10 billion these days. It's not a trivial expense. If we're going to soon need dozens of nuclear reactors to power cryptocurrencies, that's worth discussing at least. You can't brush it away as something insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
- retrogradeorbit 9y agoWhat if my electricity comes from solar or nuclear power? Have you ever taken a commercial air flight? Please, no. Stop doing that already. Your carbon footprint is too high. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_aviation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_aviati...
- philipodonnell 9y ago1) There are more cryptocurrencies than Bitcoin 2) Some of those cryptocurrencies have different proof of work algorithms 3) Some of those are designed specifically for browser-based mining and have nothing to do with Bitcoin's ASIC-optimized POW
- mxschumacher 9y agoWhat is groundbreaking about Brave?
- imron 9y agoOptional micropayments incorporated in to the browser, paid out to content creators based on site usage.
- atticusberg 9y agoWhenever an advertisement is displayed to you, brave awards you BAT which you then pay a percentage of to the site owner. Brave also controls what kind of advertisements you can see and prevents things like auto playing videos and full screen ads from cropping up. It also allows you to apportion micro payments to content producers. Won’t weigh in on whether this makes brave groundbreaking or not, but this is at least part of what it does that makes it unique. It also has this whole interface it exposes to advertisers and content owners I don’t fully understand.
- viach 9y ago> Quite some cryptocurrencies use a mining algorithm for which making specialised hardware is impossible There is a GPU miner for Monero (actually, there is a GPU miner for everything) which turns in-browser mining into not that profitable idea.
- trey-jones 9y agoCryptonight is specifically designed to be more friendly to CPU mining. You can read more about that in the Monero team's recent blog post: https://getmonero.org/2018/02/11/PoW-change-and-key-reuse.html https://getmonero.org/2018/02/11/PoW-change-and-key-reuse.ht... It seems they have opted to prefer browser miners and botnets over centralization caused by dedicated hardware (ASICs). Profitibility in the traditional sense factors in electricity, but when you're using someone else's electricity, that's not a consideration. If you have enough users, the return is quite reasonable for the site owner.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- bryanlarsen 9y agoOpting in to in-browser mining is either stupid or theft. CPU mining costs more in electricity than you get out in currency. If you pay for your own electricity, you'd be better off donating directly. If you don't pay for your own electricity, you're donating electricity from whoever is paying for that electricity. This may or may not be theft, but is definitely morally dubious.
- saint_fiasco 9y agoLots of people pay their own electricity but can't pay directly for online content. Especially in the third world, people often don't have credit cards or bank accounts. When they do, transaction costs make microtransactions inefficient.
- piaste 9y ago> If you pay for your own electricity, you'd be better off donating directly. But to donate directly, you'd need a common payment service. That means registering (password and two-factor), then either transferring money to your account or authorizing it to draw from your bank account, and finally sending the payment, probably revealing a fair few bit of information about yourself to a website you may like but not necessarily trust. And every step of that process can be hacked, or have connection problems, or you may be on a different computer and need to re-login, and so on. Paying with electricity lets you skip all that, and HN should be well aware that convenience is worth a lot of money. In addition to that, with money you must choose how much to donate, and that is a burden on its own. (Does this blogger deserve one buck, or two? I gave two to that article last week, and this dude is almost as good, but I've decided my weekly budget is X €, and I'm almost over it, etc. etc.) With a JS miner, you pay exactly as long as you keep the tab open, which is a pretty good proxy for how much the page is personally valuable to you.
- minitech 9y ago> With a JS miner, you pay exactly as long as you keep the tab open, which is a pretty good proxy for how much the page is personally valuable to you. I don’t think it is. People open links in new tabs for later, and “later” can be quite a while.
- OscarTheGrinch 9y agoIf browser mining was a good deal for the end user the vast majority of its proponents wouldn't feel the need for stealth. As it is implemented currently It's yet another example of preaditory behaviour killing herbivores at the digtal watering hole.
- onion2k 9y agoIf browser mining was a good deal for the end user the vast majority of its proponents wouldn't feel the need for stealth. Paul Graham might disagree; "The two most important things to understand about startup investing, as a business, are (1) that effectively all the returns are concentrated in a few big winners, and (2) that the best ideas look initially like bad ideas." (emphasis mine) [From http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html] Stealth is not necessarily a sign something is bad; it might just be hard to persuade people that it's good, and that's a reason to be stealthy.
- jellicle 9y agoI'm afraid the doctrine of "if it looks bad, it must be good!" is not in fact true or generally applicable. And it's not what Graham is saying, for that matter. If you read a bit further: "It also reminds you that the vast majority of ideas that seem bad are bad." The idea of running up every web browsing computer to 100% CPU, costing them tens of dollars in electricity while giving you a few cents of cryptocurrency, seems bad and is bad.
- okxyd 9y agoI totally agree that the way it's implemented currently is awful however don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, it's a new way to transmit very very small amount of values.
- jxub 9y agoThe fonts and images on the blog are really stylish. Props for the design!
- berkes 9y agoThanks! If you're interested, the blog is in Jekyll, and all of it is open source ad on github: https://github.com/berkes/berkes.github.com/ https://github.com/berkes/berkes.github.com/
- Santosh83 9y agoWhen I pay in cash (digital or otherwise), I know what I give out in terms of value for goods or services. This concept of renting out your computer time on the other hand is vague. How much 'currency' will be mined? Will it be proportional to the goods/services I get to use in exchange? How long will the process take? What if my system fails midway during 'payment'? Can this concept be extended to run arbitrary code in your browser in exchange for the service? Right now Javascript is at least nominally related to the page you access. But what if tomorrow the code you're asked to execute is totally unconnected with the service being offered? This just smacks of convenience for the implementers and as for the user, it exchanges a straightforward system for a murky deal.
- scotty79 9y agoActually that's what I like about the idea. Reading prices, considering value of the things I buy in relation to those prices, picking most worthy alternative is a job that is assigned to every consumer by free market. I find it bothersome and after two decades or so of being consumer it is boring for me. Just saying "pay this guy whatever" without the fear of being taken to the cleaners sounds very attractive to me.
- SturgeonsLaw 9y agoHopefully it would encourage more interesting, long form content that keeps people on the page
- okxyd 9y ago>When I pay in cash (digital or otherwise), I know what I give out in terms of value for goods or services. This concept of renting out your computer time on the other hand is vague. When you watch ads and get data-mined do your really now how much value you pay? I don't think so, it's safe to safe that all of us have no clue about the price we indirectly pay for services we on internet, most of it is just free in appearance. >How much 'currency' will be mined? Will it be proportional to the goods/services I get to use in exchange? How long will the process take? What if my system fails midway during 'payment'? The norms are not established yet since it's a totally new way to monetize content on internet however how much you will pay will probably be determined in hashes. Here an example with a new blockchain (Nimiq) of a micropayment you could do: http://coinmiq.com/mine/eyJ3YWxsZXQiOiJOUTI3IFJDNUIgOUU1QSBTMDlNIDk1TFEgRzNONCBMSFEwIFU5RFggRURLTSIsIm5hbWUiOiJEb25hdGlvbiIsIm5vdGUiOiJIYWNrZXJuZXdzIGV4YW1wbGUiLCJoYXNoZXMiOjEwMDAwfQ== http://coinmiq.com/mine/eyJ3YWxsZXQiOiJOUTI3IFJDNUIgOUU1QSBT... >This just smacks of convenience for the implementers and as for the user, it exchanges a straightforward system for a murky deal. I disagree, in my opinion it opens an entire new way to do micropayments on the web.
- blocksceptic 9y agoThis idea is fundamentally flawed because mining is ultimately a zero-sum game. If this approach became commonplace as the author suggests, it would greatly increase the number of publishers squabbling over much smaller pieces of the pie. In any case, you're effectively paying for the mining on your power bill. So nevermind that this approach disadvantages users who pay higher rates for electricity or have older, less-power-efficient computers.
- mido22 9y agoI think it is not a bad idea, imagine the mining is taking place only when the page is active and (max) 5 - 10$ on your electricity bill split among all the publisher, a much better alternative to ads if you ask me.
- ulrikrasmussen 9y agoExcept it doesn't really play well together with battery-powered devices.
- tazard 9y agoHow about disabling on battery devices then?
- amelius 9y agoThen everybody would unplug their laptops to save on their energy bill.
- ChrisSD 9y agoIs there a battery API for websites? The old one was deprecated because it caused too many issues (e.g. with fingerprinting).
- berkes 9y agoThis is what I -somewhat- did in the example: I've disabled it for mobile. I don't think browsers have an API to detect what power-source the underlying machine is using, though.
- ebbv 9y agoIs this for real? There is no justification. It’s theft plain and simple. Nothing has gotten me to turn on NoScript by default but if this becomes commonplace I will. I know the author is doing opt-in mining but that’s obviously going to be as popular as opt-in ad tracking vs automatic. The model will be pages just serve up the in browser mining without asking.
- trey-jones 9y agoI would say that opt-in could see some success if used in place of paywalls, etc. Sure, not many people are going to opt-in to "please give me some money, I work hard", but if the New York Times said, this article is for subscribers, but you can read it if you'll mine for me while doing so.
- Traubenfuchs 9y agoDon't worry. There is a nocoin adblock list.
- berkes 9y ago> It’s theft plain and simple I explicitly made a case for opt-in. How is that "theft"? And whether or not that is popular is besides the case. If it is impopular, it still is not "theft", is it?
- akkadak 9y agohttps://medium.com/@fubukilabs/ethical-use-of-browser-based-cryptocurrency-mining-4c6c82c1a7f6 https://medium.com/@fubukilabs/ethical-use-of-browser-based-...
- gwbas1c 9y agoWhen we look at conventional money, (specifically the USD,) "printing" money is available to almost everyone with decent credit. We print money when we use credit cards and when we take out a mortgage on a home. If websites took small payments in a cryptocurrency where mining the cryptocurrency took about the same amount of time as it takes to consume the content, then "printing" money is available to almost anyone with a decent device. It's also a good way to set a price for content; instead of some bozo thinking that his/her article is worth $3 or $15. I think that cryptocurrency, as a technology, still has far to go before it can support this kind of commerce. This is in terms of technological improvement, scalability, and a design that takes into account how economics works on a large scale.
- trey-jones 9y agoI wrote a tool to enable this, and promote responsible use: https://github.com/trey-jones/xmrwasp#a-word-about-responsibility https://github.com/trey-jones/xmrwasp#a-word-about-responsib... So I guess I'm clearly in favor of it. In general I would prefer opt-in mining to advertising. If you are interested in why, I'll be happy to discuss. I think my thoughts are laid out in the README. I also made a simple demo page here: https://www.xmrwasp.com https://www.xmrwasp.com It won't mine unless you ask it to. The point of the demo is to check out what impact various degrees of mining have on your other activities. The default is VERY low with a single thread and 50% throttle. I'm not sure if this is a polarizing topic, or if I'm not thinking clearly about it because I've gotten on the boat, drunk the kool-aid, or whatever.
- philipodonnell 9y agoHN of all places really surprised me with this reaction. Publishers _desperately_ need an alternative payment system with the convenience of an ad-supported model, microtransactions, and a direct payer-payee relationship. Browser-based mining has a potential to provide that, but it is still very early and evolving. Also why is everyone talking about Bitcoin in this thread? No one is trying to mine Bitcoin in the browser. There are other cryptocurrencies than Bitcoin. Some of those are designed to run in the browser specifically to address the concern with using a POW system in an intentionally resource-constrained environment.