15 ms·

It is bad to use a bunch of the user's CPU without any notice. They will probably notice that your site makes their computer slow and never come back again. Als

It is bad to use a bunch of the user's CPU without any notice. They will probably notice that your site makes their computer slow and never come back again. Also, once they find out you've been using their CPU power/electricity/battery life surreptitiously for private, unshared gain, you will probably have some angry customers. Additionally, does this automatically hook in to slush's pool or something? Bitcoin mining is practically useless on CPU; even the fastest CPUs out get way, way less than 10mhash. The average length of time to find a block at 9999khash and current difficulty is 1200+ days, so even that estimate is over-optimistic, so this isn't worth anything if your users don't sit on your site for 5 years+, unless it's hooked into a pool or some other contraption to pay on shares instead of blocks.

endian 16y ago
way, way less than 10mhash s/mhash/Mhash/
- Groxx 16y ago
  that's a bit pedantic, ya know... the number only means something to people who know the system even a little bit, and they'll immediately translate to the proper unit because 10 milli-hashes per second makes no sense. Unless you're mining by hand. It's like ranting that people talk about "10mb" files. Or "100gb" or "100GB" drives. When they're technically "93.1GiB" drives ("gibibyte" [1],[2], or [3]). [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive#Capacity_measurements http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive#Capacity_measur... [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mebibyte http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mebibyte [3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix
  - ghshephard 16y ago
    Ironically - your example speaks against itself. 100GB Drive is a very precise and agreed upon way of referring to a drive - it means 1x10^11 bytes. 93.1 GiB drive is unusual - we don't typically use powers of 2 when referring to drive length - so if you really mean 93.1 GiB, then it's important you call it out as such, or people (storage admins, driver manufacturers, and operating system developers) will understand you to mean 1X10^11 bytes when you say 100 Gigabytes. Precision has it's place.
    - hmottestad 16y ago
      I thought this was the common way (gibi that is) to refer to harddrives in the OS, I thought that that was the reason harddrives were 100gb when i bought them but only showed up as 93gb on my computer.
      - amalcon 16y ago
        It is. Everyone except the hard drive manufacturers uses GiB for technical reasons. Hard drive manufacturers use GB for marketing (and clarity, but mostly marketing) reasons. It used to be common to speak of sizes in "hard drive megabytes". Eventually, the disk manufacturers won the pointless semantic battle and that went away. In practice, it matters not in the slightest.
      - jpr 16y ago
        Yet another case where "the common way" is wrong and disgusting. Nothing new here.
cookiecaper 16y ago
And I should add that the prospects of finding any meaningful amount of shares, while much better than finding a block, are still quite low. My GPU can find a couple of shares per minute in a good minute, but it operates at 55.5Mhash, over 10x faster than my CPU (i7-2600K). Consider that most are going to have really slow CPUs and share the processor power with other heavy applications (Flash games), and you might get one share from the best computers in an average 10-20 minute visit if you're lucky. Shares are worth increasingly little and it depends on how you calculate what each share is worth (since btc generation is really totally based on blocks and each pool decides the value / share on its own, etc.), but I really doubt this is a viable replacement for advertisements or any other money-making endeavor for anyone, even the largest websites where people spend lots of time (Facebook, gmail).
- greyman 16y ago
  That was my first though - it's a nice idea, but came at least one year too late. Just yesterday, I ran miner through the www.bitcoinplus.com website, and on my regular PC machine it generated 0.002 BTC in 24 hours. I am afraid the bitcoin mining is practically over, and the much more interesting question is - should I really invest my real money to buy some bitcoins? (current rate is about 7 USD). I am curious to learn what other HN-ers think of all this stuff.
  - cloudwalking 16y ago
    An economist's take on bitcoin: http://www.quora.com/Is-the-cryptocurrency-Bitcoin-a-good-idea?srid=pxt http://www.quora.com/Is-the-cryptocurrency-Bitcoin-a-good-id... Spoiler: bitcoin is a scam
    - greyman 16y ago
      Even if he is right and bitcoin shouldn't be considered a "currency", but rather an asset or a scam to enrich the early adopters, I think there is still a question I wrote above, namely, if it is worth to buy bitcoins for money now.
    - 16y ago
Groxx 16y ago
Interestingly, from post #9: Chrome13-canary: ~15.2k/s FF4: ~6.4k/s Safari5: ~6.2k/s IE9: ~1.6k/s So yeah, massively massively slower than regular GPU mining. Anyone know of a way to push WebGL into doing hashing functions, and reading the results out?
- wladimir 16y ago
  If you can have shaders in WebGL with integer ops (bitshifts, xor) you could do it.
- code_duck 16y ago
  And if that's all IE9 does, how about the 40-60% of visitors using earlier IE versions with even worse JS performance (and no WebGL, of course). This doesn't seem particularly viable, but it is a nice effort.
- trotsky 16y ago
  Cribbing from post #35: And you come to a total of 21,600,000 unique visitors per day that you would need to your website in order to hash the equivalent of a $100 GPU. Or make about $8 per day according to the bitcoin calculator right now from 21 million unique visitors.... totally not worth it. So, yeah. Significantly crapping on the user experience of 21M people by reducing their battery life, adding heat, adding fan noise, slowing down other actions - all to substitute for one gpu? It seems like there must be better ways to ruin your high traffic websites reputation if that's what you're looking to do.
thedeuce 16y ago
all this new javascript stuff only gives me more and more reason to use noscript

endian 16y ago

way, way less than 10mhash s/mhash/Mhash/

Groxx 16y ago
that's a bit pedantic, ya know... the number only means something to people who know the system even a little bit, and they'll immediately translate to the proper unit because 10 milli-hashes per second makes no sense. Unless you're mining by hand. It's like ranting that people talk about "10mb" files. Or "100gb" or "100GB" drives. When they're technically "93.1GiB" drives ("gibibyte" [1],[2], or [3]). [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive#Capacity_measurements http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive#Capacity_measur... [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mebibyte http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mebibyte [3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix
- ghshephard 16y ago
  Ironically - your example speaks against itself. 100GB Drive is a very precise and agreed upon way of referring to a drive - it means 1x10^11 bytes. 93.1 GiB drive is unusual - we don't typically use powers of 2 when referring to drive length - so if you really mean 93.1 GiB, then it's important you call it out as such, or people (storage admins, driver manufacturers, and operating system developers) will understand you to mean 1X10^11 bytes when you say 100 Gigabytes. Precision has it's place.
  - hmottestad 16y ago
    I thought this was the common way (gibi that is) to refer to harddrives in the OS, I thought that that was the reason harddrives were 100gb when i bought them but only showed up as 93gb on my computer.
    - amalcon 16y ago
      It is. Everyone except the hard drive manufacturers uses GiB for technical reasons. Hard drive manufacturers use GB for marketing (and clarity, but mostly marketing) reasons. It used to be common to speak of sizes in "hard drive megabytes". Eventually, the disk manufacturers won the pointless semantic battle and that went away. In practice, it matters not in the slightest.
    - jpr 16y ago
      Yet another case where "the common way" is wrong and disgusting. Nothing new here.

cookiecaper 16y ago

And I should add that the prospects of finding any meaningful amount of shares, while much better than finding a block, are still quite low. My GPU can find a couple of shares per minute in a good minute, but it operates at 55.5Mhash, over 10x faster than my CPU (i7-2600K). Consider that most are going to have really slow CPUs and share the processor power with other heavy applications (Flash games), and you might get one share from the best computers in an average 10-20 minute visit if you're lucky. Shares are worth increasingly little and it depends on how you calculate what each share is worth (since btc generation is really totally based on blocks and each pool decides the value / share on its own, etc.), but I really doubt this is a viable replacement for advertisements or any other money-making endeavor for anyone, even the largest websites where people spend lots of time (Facebook, gmail).

greyman 16y ago
That was my first though - it's a nice idea, but came at least one year too late. Just yesterday, I ran miner through the www.bitcoinplus.com website, and on my regular PC machine it generated 0.002 BTC in 24 hours. I am afraid the bitcoin mining is practically over, and the much more interesting question is - should I really invest my real money to buy some bitcoins? (current rate is about 7 USD). I am curious to learn what other HN-ers think of all this stuff.
- cloudwalking 16y ago
  An economist's take on bitcoin: http://www.quora.com/Is-the-cryptocurrency-Bitcoin-a-good-idea?srid=pxt http://www.quora.com/Is-the-cryptocurrency-Bitcoin-a-good-id... Spoiler: bitcoin is a scam
  - greyman 16y ago
    Even if he is right and bitcoin shouldn't be considered a "currency", but rather an asset or a scam to enrich the early adopters, I think there is still a question I wrote above, namely, if it is worth to buy bitcoins for money now.
  - 16y ago

Groxx 16y ago

Interestingly, from post #9: Chrome13-canary: ~15.2k/s FF4: ~6.4k/s Safari5: ~6.2k/s IE9: ~1.6k/s So yeah, massively massively slower than regular GPU mining. Anyone know of a way to push WebGL into doing hashing functions, and reading the results out?

wladimir 16y ago
If you can have shaders in WebGL with integer ops (bitshifts, xor) you could do it.
code_duck 16y ago
And if that's all IE9 does, how about the 40-60% of visitors using earlier IE versions with even worse JS performance (and no WebGL, of course). This doesn't seem particularly viable, but it is a nice effort.
trotsky 16y ago
Cribbing from post #35: And you come to a total of 21,600,000 unique visitors per day that you would need to your website in order to hash the equivalent of a $100 GPU. Or make about $8 per day according to the bitcoin calculator right now from 21 million unique visitors.... totally not worth it. So, yeah. Significantly crapping on the user experience of 21M people by reducing their battery life, adding heat, adding fan noise, slowing down other actions - all to substitute for one gpu? It seems like there must be better ways to ruin your high traffic websites reputation if that's what you're looking to do.

thedeuce 16y ago

all this new javascript stuff only gives me more and more reason to use noscript