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I strongly believe that extensions stealing resources and power from unwitting users should be banned. However, that many legitimate extensions have also been p

by wyc 9y ago

I strongly believe that extensions stealing resources and power from unwitting users should be banned. However, that many legitimate extensions have also been pulled reinforces that this is a lot of power in one place with no observable external oversight, and it has strong resemblances to how companies such as CloudFlare can ban whoever they want[1]. "Just don't use the platform" is becoming more expensive and less practical for consumers every passing day. The same economies of scale that allow individual Internet companies to effectively dominate markets also confer the power to decide who has access and how, even if there's essentially only one game in town. Anti-trust regulation may experience some interesting evolution these next few years. [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/cloudflares-ceo-has-a-plan-to-never-censor-hate-speech-again/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/cloudflares-ceo-...

EthanHeilman 9y ago
What if they tell the users and require user action to begin mining? It seems pretty rich for a company whose business model revolves around building traps for user data and then using to that data to drive mostly unwanted targeted advertising. Of the three choices: 1. paid services, 2. privacy violation + ads or 3. service uses X% of my CPU, I'd choose 3 every time. The killer app of cryptocurrencies is monetizing PoW. Someone is going to build the new doubleclick on that and displace google.
- simias 9y ago
  I'll choose 4 every time: pay for services I find valuable with real money and use an ad blocker otherwise. It seems that many of these mining extensions are obvious scams anyway, an other commenter in this thread gave this as an example: https://getcryptotab.com/en/ https://getcryptotab.com/en/ It's an obvious pyramid scheme. Even if you wanted to mine Monero in your web browser (not exactly the most efficient way I'd wager) why would you share the benefits with some random third party instead of directly joining an open pool? If you want a laugh I suggest looking at their calculator that (with the default values) tells you that you're going to win $40k if you manage to enroll 10 million people underneath you. Good luck! This particular extension is the first result when you search "bitcoin" in the Chrome Web Store, with close to 20k ratings (all absolutely genuine I'm sure). Websites that actually use mining as an alternative to ads don't use extensions in my experience, they simply load a Javascript/wasm miner à la coinhive.
  - prepend 9y ago
    “Even if you wanted to mine Monero in your web browser (not exactly the most efficient way I'd wager) why would you share the benefits with some random third party instead of directly joining an open pool?” I’d be cool with having a site mine at 35% cpu for the few minutes while I use their site in exchange for no ads and no tracking. I think this is likely the only way that we can replace the Google/Facebook ad-driven business model that runs the consumer Internet.
    - cronin101 9y ago
      Would it not be better for you (and the rest of the world) if you instead willingly paid them the equivalent portion of your power bill, without actively wasting the resources? I really don't want the world to devolve into a future where armies of ignored pre-teens with ipads are rapidly accelerating global warming, just so that they can watch clickbait videos and share content in $social_network_vNext, on sites sponsored by "monitising PoW".
      - prepend 9y ago
        Yes, it definitely would. I just think that it’s easier to mine as it basically does that without having a lot of billing in between. What I think the crypto that sticks will basically be the unit of exchange where people are able to swap cpu, disk, memory without intermediaries. So it’s not speculation, but a real market for unused resources. In the olden days phone numbers (900-SEXX) could charge you through the phone bill. It was convenient but really high transaction fees. If you could do this with electricity without having a big transaction that would be cool. Also environmentally friendly as places with high power costs (coal, oil) could easily switch to lower cost resources (hydro, nuke) with renewables.
    - simias 9y ago
      But that's the thing, I really don't think what you're proposing has anything to do with what google wants to ban. What you're talking about is already possible using services like coinhive that can be used to embed a miner on your page instead (or on top) of using regular ads. That doesn't require any extension. These cryptocurrency extensions like the one I linked in my previous post are not used to monetize websites, rather they're just a somewhat regular crypto miner shipped as a browser add-on. You don't use it to pay for browsing pages, you use it directly to mine the currency and earn money. It's probably significantly less efficient than a stand-alone miner but it's easier to distribute that way, especially if your goal is to scam people into integrating your pyramid scheme.

by wyc 9y ago

EthanHeilman 9y ago

What if they tell the users and require user action to begin mining? It seems pretty rich for a company whose business model revolves around building traps for user data and then using to that data to drive mostly unwanted targeted advertising. Of the three choices: 1. paid services, 2. privacy violation + ads or 3. service uses X% of my CPU, I'd choose 3 every time. The killer app of cryptocurrencies is monetizing PoW. Someone is going to build the new doubleclick on that and displace google.

simias 9y ago
I'll choose 4 every time: pay for services I find valuable with real money and use an ad blocker otherwise. It seems that many of these mining extensions are obvious scams anyway, an other commenter in this thread gave this as an example: https://getcryptotab.com/en/ https://getcryptotab.com/en/ It's an obvious pyramid scheme. Even if you wanted to mine Monero in your web browser (not exactly the most efficient way I'd wager) why would you share the benefits with some random third party instead of directly joining an open pool? If you want a laugh I suggest looking at their calculator that (with the default values) tells you that you're going to win $40k if you manage to enroll 10 million people underneath you. Good luck! This particular extension is the first result when you search "bitcoin" in the Chrome Web Store, with close to 20k ratings (all absolutely genuine I'm sure). Websites that actually use mining as an alternative to ads don't use extensions in my experience, they simply load a Javascript/wasm miner à la coinhive.
- prepend 9y ago
  “Even if you wanted to mine Monero in your web browser (not exactly the most efficient way I'd wager) why would you share the benefits with some random third party instead of directly joining an open pool?” I’d be cool with having a site mine at 35% cpu for the few minutes while I use their site in exchange for no ads and no tracking. I think this is likely the only way that we can replace the Google/Facebook ad-driven business model that runs the consumer Internet.
  - cronin101 9y ago
    Would it not be better for you (and the rest of the world) if you instead willingly paid them the equivalent portion of your power bill, without actively wasting the resources? I really don't want the world to devolve into a future where armies of ignored pre-teens with ipads are rapidly accelerating global warming, just so that they can watch clickbait videos and share content in $social_network_vNext, on sites sponsored by "monitising PoW".
    - prepend 9y ago
      Yes, it definitely would. I just think that it’s easier to mine as it basically does that without having a lot of billing in between. What I think the crypto that sticks will basically be the unit of exchange where people are able to swap cpu, disk, memory without intermediaries. So it’s not speculation, but a real market for unused resources. In the olden days phone numbers (900-SEXX) could charge you through the phone bill. It was convenient but really high transaction fees. If you could do this with electricity without having a big transaction that would be cool. Also environmentally friendly as places with high power costs (coal, oil) could easily switch to lower cost resources (hydro, nuke) with renewables.
  - simias 9y ago
    But that's the thing, I really don't think what you're proposing has anything to do with what google wants to ban. What you're talking about is already possible using services like coinhive that can be used to embed a miner on your page instead (or on top) of using regular ads. That doesn't require any extension. These cryptocurrency extensions like the one I linked in my previous post are not used to monetize websites, rather they're just a somewhat regular crypto miner shipped as a browser add-on. You don't use it to pay for browsing pages, you use it directly to mine the currency and earn money. It's probably significantly less efficient than a stand-alone miner but it's easier to distribute that way, especially if your goal is to scam people into integrating your pyramid scheme.