5 ms·

> Also, how is coinhive still a thing? It's too bad coinhive is so easy to abuse. I'd much rather live in a world where websites are financed with my electric

> Also, how is coinhive still a thing? It's too bad coinhive is so easy to abuse. I'd much rather live in a world where websites are financed with my electric bill rather than my data.

Kalium 8y ago
Any system that enables payments uncoupled from identity - or customer service - over the internet is going to be prone to abuse. Bad money pushes out good money, and paying with someone else's electric bill is always cheaper than paying with yours. Which is to say that pretty much any form of cryptocurrency is likely to stay abuse-prone. Practically speaking, the amount of electric bill you'd have to pay to make up the costs of what your currently pay for with data would almost certainly be shocking. I can't imagine that it costs anything like $5 to mine $5 worth of Monero on your average computer in the first world. And that would be just enough to pay for Gmail, never mind everything else!
- uberswe 8y ago
  On an average computer it would take weeks or months to mine $5 worth of Monero but it is doable.
  - Kalium 8y ago
    I don't mean to suggest in any way, shape, form, or manner that it cannot be done! Only that it cannot be done in a way that is anything resembling cost-effective. The sheer, staggering inefficiency involved might help incentivize usage away from a proxy for micropayments and towards malware.
zamadatix 8y ago
I'd prefer to stick to data exchanges that don't double my draw on electrical generation. Even just buying 2x as many solar panels to mine still has more impact than traditional currency.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
> I'd much rather live in a world where websites are financed with my electric bill rather than my data. In general, I wouldn't mind that much if I had to pay some extra "Internet subscription" to cover publisher costs, if reasonable. I don't think electricity bill is the right place to include it in. And I definitely do not want this charge to be included by the means of cryptocurrencies - they're wasteful at their very core (as opposed to every other financial instrument in existence), and I don't want to support such ideas. Not to mention that, like 'Kalium observes, it would take extreme amounts of power use to "send" a publisher some reasonable amount of money.
titzer 8y ago
I dunno about you, but wasting vast amounts of energy in some incredibly inefficient* techno-currency Ponzi scheme is just stupid and I'd rather we figure out something better than these two alternatives. * ASICs are roughly 100x more power-efficient at essentially any crypto mining algorithm
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > ASICs are roughly 100x more power-efficient at essentially any crypto mining algorithm That's half of the problem. The other half is that cryptocurrencies rely, in a structural way, on their generation to be difficult, so when enough ASICs get deployed, the currency ups its "difficulty factor", multiplying the amount of power you have to burn for the same reward. Really, if I were a supervillain who wanted to accelerate energy crisis and climate change by exploiting human greed, cryptocurrencies is the scheme I would come up with.
  - ruskerdax 8y ago
    If I were a socialist who was politically opposed to the huge benefits of cryptocurrency gaining major adoption I would boil it down to "exploiting human greed" and pretend it's operating under the assumption that the energy expenditures are a "waste" and therefor detrimental to climate change. If you can't understand the compound harm to the environment (for starters) of nations states existing and controlling currency, I feel bad for you. If you do understand it, you should know you're rightly fearful of this technology, because it's going to play a major factor in your future demise.
    - kbenson 8y ago
      > If you can't understand the compound harm to the environment (for starters) of nations states existing and controlling currency, I feel bad for you. Show, don't tell. If you can't explain it adequately to an audience, then you don't know it well enough to to be stating it as fact.
      - 8y ago
madshiva 8y ago
I'd much rather live in a world where we can share things without paid somethings, where people contribute not split information where everyone is copying each other. 90% of work, data copied on Internet have no value. Dunno why we need to pay for Clickbait article, or article without value or translated article (EN->FR)
boomlinde 8y ago
It's not just your electric bill; that power is being generated somehow. Until that process is clean and green and completely accounts for externalities I prefer whatever wastes less electricity. I'd personally much rather live in a world where websites are financed up-front or not at all. It would disincentivize the low-effort creation of pointless or misleading material simply to direct time and attention to ads and miners.

> Also, how is coinhive still a thing? It's too bad coinhive is so easy to abuse. I'd much rather live in a world where websites are financed with my electric bill rather than my data.

Kalium 8y ago

Any system that enables payments uncoupled from identity - or customer service - over the internet is going to be prone to abuse. Bad money pushes out good money, and paying with someone else's electric bill is always cheaper than paying with yours. Which is to say that pretty much any form of cryptocurrency is likely to stay abuse-prone. Practically speaking, the amount of electric bill you'd have to pay to make up the costs of what your currently pay for with data would almost certainly be shocking. I can't imagine that it costs anything like $5 to mine $5 worth of Monero on your average computer in the first world. And that would be just enough to pay for Gmail, never mind everything else!

uberswe 8y ago
On an average computer it would take weeks or months to mine $5 worth of Monero but it is doable.
- Kalium 8y ago
  I don't mean to suggest in any way, shape, form, or manner that it cannot be done! Only that it cannot be done in a way that is anything resembling cost-effective. The sheer, staggering inefficiency involved might help incentivize usage away from a proxy for micropayments and towards malware.

zamadatix 8y ago

I'd prefer to stick to data exchanges that don't double my draw on electrical generation. Even just buying 2x as many solar panels to mine still has more impact than traditional currency.

TeMPOraL 8y ago

> I'd much rather live in a world where websites are financed with my electric bill rather than my data. In general, I wouldn't mind that much if I had to pay some extra "Internet subscription" to cover publisher costs, if reasonable. I don't think electricity bill is the right place to include it in. And I definitely do not want this charge to be included by the means of cryptocurrencies - they're wasteful at their very core (as opposed to every other financial instrument in existence), and I don't want to support such ideas. Not to mention that, like 'Kalium observes, it would take extreme amounts of power use to "send" a publisher some reasonable amount of money.

titzer 8y ago

I dunno about you, but wasting vast amounts of energy in some incredibly inefficient* techno-currency Ponzi scheme is just stupid and I'd rather we figure out something better than these two alternatives. * ASICs are roughly 100x more power-efficient at essentially any crypto mining algorithm

TeMPOraL 8y ago
> ASICs are roughly 100x more power-efficient at essentially any crypto mining algorithm That's half of the problem. The other half is that cryptocurrencies rely, in a structural way, on their generation to be difficult, so when enough ASICs get deployed, the currency ups its "difficulty factor", multiplying the amount of power you have to burn for the same reward. Really, if I were a supervillain who wanted to accelerate energy crisis and climate change by exploiting human greed, cryptocurrencies is the scheme I would come up with.
- ruskerdax 8y ago
  If I were a socialist who was politically opposed to the huge benefits of cryptocurrency gaining major adoption I would boil it down to "exploiting human greed" and pretend it's operating under the assumption that the energy expenditures are a "waste" and therefor detrimental to climate change. If you can't understand the compound harm to the environment (for starters) of nations states existing and controlling currency, I feel bad for you. If you do understand it, you should know you're rightly fearful of this technology, because it's going to play a major factor in your future demise.
  - kbenson 8y ago
    > If you can't understand the compound harm to the environment (for starters) of nations states existing and controlling currency, I feel bad for you. Show, don't tell. If you can't explain it adequately to an audience, then you don't know it well enough to to be stating it as fact.
    - 8y ago

madshiva 8y ago

I'd much rather live in a world where we can share things without paid somethings, where people contribute not split information where everyone is copying each other. 90% of work, data copied on Internet have no value. Dunno why we need to pay for Clickbait article, or article without value or translated article (EN->FR)

boomlinde 8y ago

It's not just your electric bill; that power is being generated somehow. Until that process is clean and green and completely accounts for externalities I prefer whatever wastes less electricity. I'd personally much rather live in a world where websites are financed up-front or not at all. It would disincentivize the low-effort creation of pointless or misleading material simply to direct time and attention to ads and miners.