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Instead of trying to block ad-mining, consider this; With the right PoW algorithm and the hardware access to optimize it, it really seems like an excellent eco
by zaroth 9y ago
Instead of trying to block ad-mining, consider this;
With the right PoW algorithm and the hardware access to optimize it, it really seems like an excellent economic model, specifically if you must opt-in in exchange for seeing no ads.
Today we deal with advertisements that destroy the user experience and have a very real cost to the user in having to navigate through intrusive ads. Which also, by the way, often cause the same over-revving and slow downs as mining do.
In response, ad blockers rewrite or block a site’s code to eliminate the ads, consuming the content but starving the site from its only revenue stream. Not theft, perhaps not even morally wrong, but certainly to the detriment of the site owner.
Microtransactions or subscription-based content pools with view-based payouts have been proposed for years and have had some traction but certainly aren’t widespread.
If you could opt-in to mine on behalf of the sites you visit in a way that respected your real-time compute resources, in exchange for a completely ad-free experience, would you do it?
It seems like mining for someone is the ultimate micro transaction. There is no overhead and no fees and you can mine for a portion of time equal to tiny fractions of a cent of value. In fact, mining for enough cycles to produce even a penny of value would be a fairly substantial amount of computation.
The crucial question is the effeciency of the process. There are no transactions fees whatsoever to mine for someone else, the bandwidth is minuscule, the code is fairly tight. But the one thing that makes it inefficient is if you’re consuming more compute than necessary to most optimally perform the PoW. In other words, if your hashrate per CPU-second is sub-optimal because the sandbox doesn’t allow an efficient PoW implementation, or because the algorithm can be run orders of magnitude more efficiently on specialized hardware, that in itself is a form of transaction fee.
If we can get a PoW algorithm which runs near-optimally on general purpose computers on a blockchain that isn’t dominated by botnets, then the economics should work out that you are paying whoever you mine for approximately the cost of the electricity required to perform the mining, effectively leading to a way to make free micropayments.
- ballenf 9y agoWould be interesting if a site had a hierarchy of content, with the top-level content only available to those running fast hardware and therefore generating more revenue. Those on cheap or slow hardware might be limited to older or less valuable content. Now that is a dystopia I don't think anyone would like to see.
- zaroth 9y agoI’m willing to bet that the value of an ad impression correlates pretty well with the relative compute power of the device. But, sites don’t generally restrict/reserve content for, e.g. Android/iPhone users because they are more/less valuable to advertisers. The premise is that opt-in mining can be used as an efficient micropayment. Any new technology can be used toward dystopian ends, or not, so it’s not a reflection at all on the merit of the idea.
- aiCeivi9 9y agoEven with perfect algorithm it won't be profitable enough. Value of mined coins will be roughly equal to value of consumed electricity used by computer (if no more efficient miner hardware exists). That gives around $1 if someone stays on your site, mining, for 8 hours. For anyone other than movie streaming sites it is unprofitable, AdSense will bring much more money. And each additional site that uses mining decreases profit for other ones, as they share the same, fixed amount for found block.
- zaroth 9y ago“... in a way that respected your real-time compute resources ...” That is to say, your machine is constantly mining 24 hours / day at an extremely preemptable low-priority on behalf of the various sites you visited that day. Definitely it can’t work that you’re only mining on behalf of the site while you’re actively looking at it, because when you’re sitting in front of your device is precisely when you don't want to be mining! As far as how much advertising value does the average internet user provide in a day? Facebooks ARPU is about $25 in the US. And apparently Facebook users spend an average of 50 minutes per day on Facebook. So that’s 8.2 cents per hour, so we’re within an order of magnitude!
- proofofmoon 9y ago> profits are slim at best, and you generally take what you can get from a revenue perspective ... publishers today have about as much bargaining power as do Uber drivers [1] Because of the race to the bottom incentives for publishers, we will see both intrusive, secret crypto-mining AND advertisements, not either-or. [1] https://stratechery.com/2015/why-web-pages-suck/ https://stratechery.com/2015/why-web-pages-suck/