12 ms·

> The whole internet is showing the first signs of a digital Resource Curse [1] brought by crypto mining. Crypto mining changed the economics of the digital wor

> The whole internet is showing the first signs of a digital Resource Curse [1] brought by crypto mining. Crypto mining changed the economics of the digital world in such a drastic way that it is poisoning all kinds of internet interactions. It is not just about disrupting how money used to work, it is disrupting every kind of interaction, even those that had nothing to do with money. Things that were completely economically neutral before, so people did them just for fun, can now be exploited to extract value, so naturally some people do it and the previous innocent/neutral status quo is lost. For example: most free unix shell providers, a fun tradition from nerds from the 90s, had to shut down because now there is such a big economic incentive to abuse such free service. The whole internet is showing the first signs of a digital resource curse brought on by advertising. Advertising changed the economics of the digital world in such a drastic way that it is poisoning all kinds of internet interactions. It is disrupting every kind of interaction, even those that had nothing to do with advertising. Things that were completely economically neutral before, so people did them just for fun, can now be exploited to extract value, so naturally some people do it and the previous innocent/neutral status quo is lost. For example: most free, non-monetized content providers, a fun tradition from nerds from the 90s, don't exist now because there is such a big economic incentive to abuse such free service.

seizethegdgap 5y ago
You should read their second paragraph. Unless you were going for some kind of meta-joke/correction, in which case bravo.
- seanw444 5y ago
  It was definitely a serious-toned joke. Bravo from me as well. I don't know how people navigate the web without an ad blocker anymore. Do people actually do that? it's unbearable. Slows pages down, clutters the actual content, wastes more battery on phones and laptops, generally rewards companies for spying on you... it's awful. Can we go back to when people weren't so lazy as to do everything in their power to not have to give their cash directly to someone? Sure, you don't have to hand your money to a content maker on YouTube anymore, for example, but I wonder how much the lifespan of your device is decreased by the added processing that comes from advertising, and how much that adds up in the end. You may as well just have paid them money directly in the first place. Apply that thought to any "free-but-only-because-it's-ad-ridden" software/service.
  - hirako2000 5y ago
    interesting point of comparison. the much bigger cost of ads is probably the attention loss. we don't have much attention capacity. ads increasingly syphon it. I guestimate that attention loss for an average person is worth order of magnitude more than the extra cpu tearing + bandwidth costs required to run ads. but like for your comparison, most users aren't even realising they are paying a significant mental cost by accepting those ads.
    - Nextgrid 5y ago
      It's not just a mental cost - someone has to pay for those ads and all the machinery & various middlemen that make it possible. That someone is all of us; the prices we pay for most goods include the overhead of polluting society with ads. You end up paying a double tax - a monetary one and an attention one.
      - hirako2000 5y ago
        agreed. it's multiple costs. and we all pay for that waste and the long term consequences of it.
pavlov 5y ago
Ads at least require an audience. Crypto mining abuse requires just the ability to execute anything. That’s why ads are like acne for the Internet, but crypto is a cancer.
- rekoil 5y ago
  > crypto is a cancer. Proof of Work is a cancer. The two are heavily intertwined, but they are not technically mutual terms. Proof of Work needs to be stopped, irrelevant of what it is used for.
  - ta988 5y ago
    We had the promise that this would change many years ago, I doubt it will change for many years to come.
    - rekoil 5y ago
      As of right now the Ethereum foundation are still projecting ~Q2 2022 for full Proof of Stake.
  - buran77 5y ago
    PoW(hatever) is a cancer as long as the "Whatever" doesn't have any value behind it, it doesn't bring value to society because it's guaranteed to take resources without leaving anything useful behind. It incentivizes people to abuse anything at hand to obtain proof of that otherwise worthless "Whatever". Whether it's "work" or "space" or "time" then someone will always look to abuse others to obtain more proof without it creating any value. Unlike money (generically) PoWhatever cryptocurrencies aren't backed by anything anyone can define as valuable. Proof of Housing_built, Proof of Goods_transported, Proof of Music_created, Proof of Space_flights all create real value. Proof of Work where the work is without doubt useless in itself and an absolute net loss for society can't result in anything practically valuable. At best it results in a very wasteful Ponzi scheme. Imagine something as innocent as "proof of clapping hands", you may get some reward for holding a record but it's otherwise completely useless. That at least only affects you and your hands, even if a waste of time that doesn't seem to bring anything of value - joy or other practical benefits. What if someone could abuse you and force you to clap at the cost of lost productivity at work, health issues, etc. and the result of that work is... nothing?
tyjen 5y ago
This comment chain made me envision a potentially terrible future direction. Imagine a future where websites force people to consent to allowing them use your device to mine cryptocurrency while you use its services or browse its content instead of ads.
- matthewaveryusa 5y ago
  Frankly I would pick that over ads any day.
- Invictus0 5y ago
  Welcome to the future. The year is 2018. https://cyware.com/news/pirate-bay-found-running-browser-based-cryptocurrency-miner-to-generate-revenue-0e09e764 https://cyware.com/news/pirate-bay-found-running-browser-bas...
- thehappypm 5y ago
  Can you mine crypto in the browser? I know there are some native hooks, presumably JavaScript is never going to give a good hash rate, but it would be interesting if sites starting dropping JS tags that silently mined crypto in the background.
  - kmeisthax 5y ago
    WASM Monero miners were a big problem years ago.
  - causi 5y ago
    Oh certainly. Back in 2018 I found my favorite site to read online comics was turning my phone into a hot plate before I blocked JS.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    Certainly. https://github.com/jtgrassie/xmr-wasm https://github.com/jtgrassie/xmr-wasm Individually hash rate will be quite poor but if you make a mining pool out of all your users everything changes. Monero mining pools even have rules prohibiting that. https://minexmr.com/miningguide https://minexmr.com/miningguide > Botnet / Web Mining Policy > Sadly it happens that Botnets often run cryptominers on infected PCs. > minexmr does not support botnets, web miners or any other illegal activities. > Any account suspected of botnet mining or web mining will be banned.
snarf21 5y ago
Agreed, most of the world's ills could be mitigated with an extreme tax on digital advertising.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
danuker 5y ago
> because there is such a big economic incentive to abuse such free service. On my free personal blog, I have nothing for sale, and nobody discovers it in spite of the ones that do read it enjoying it. Another problem of advertising oligopolies monetizing everything is, if you don't pay them, you are invisible.
renewiltord 5y ago
But the example is untrue. The nerds are still hosting free content.
Atlas667 5y ago
It's incredible how much people can talk about capitalism without mentioning it. It's all about the trends in capital, but never about the general mode of capital. Which i do get to some extent. It does make sense to talk about trends, like advertising swallowing up all aspects of media, but critique can never be made on trends alone. Trends don't dictate processes, trends are the result of processes. If you look to explain this from the bottom up you'll hit a wall of individual decision making. But from the top down you see the influence behind those decisions, it's an economic choice that is necessitated to continue the process of capitalist accumulation in a corporation, country or even market. It's not only crypto or advertising it's the process of capital using technologies to radically transform its production process in search of more profits. Be it by established corporations or groups of crypto miners. This mode of production will do this to any technology that can advanced the generation of capital. This is the core of capitalism, the revolutionizing of production, not for humanities sake, but for profits sake. To settle on a single manifestation of this mode as its cause is to wear something like horse blinders and all conversations on the topic will be as narrow as the topic you want to hate on the most. And capital will keep chugging and keep using technology for its own sake at everyone's expense.

seizethegdgap 5y ago

You should read their second paragraph. Unless you were going for some kind of meta-joke/correction, in which case bravo.

seanw444 5y ago
It was definitely a serious-toned joke. Bravo from me as well. I don't know how people navigate the web without an ad blocker anymore. Do people actually do that? it's unbearable. Slows pages down, clutters the actual content, wastes more battery on phones and laptops, generally rewards companies for spying on you... it's awful. Can we go back to when people weren't so lazy as to do everything in their power to not have to give their cash directly to someone? Sure, you don't have to hand your money to a content maker on YouTube anymore, for example, but I wonder how much the lifespan of your device is decreased by the added processing that comes from advertising, and how much that adds up in the end. You may as well just have paid them money directly in the first place. Apply that thought to any "free-but-only-because-it's-ad-ridden" software/service.
- hirako2000 5y ago
  interesting point of comparison. the much bigger cost of ads is probably the attention loss. we don't have much attention capacity. ads increasingly syphon it. I guestimate that attention loss for an average person is worth order of magnitude more than the extra cpu tearing + bandwidth costs required to run ads. but like for your comparison, most users aren't even realising they are paying a significant mental cost by accepting those ads.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    It's not just a mental cost - someone has to pay for those ads and all the machinery & various middlemen that make it possible. That someone is all of us; the prices we pay for most goods include the overhead of polluting society with ads. You end up paying a double tax - a monetary one and an attention one.
    - hirako2000 5y ago
      agreed. it's multiple costs. and we all pay for that waste and the long term consequences of it.

pavlov 5y ago

Ads at least require an audience. Crypto mining abuse requires just the ability to execute anything. That’s why ads are like acne for the Internet, but crypto is a cancer.

rekoil 5y ago
> crypto is a cancer. Proof of Work is a cancer. The two are heavily intertwined, but they are not technically mutual terms. Proof of Work needs to be stopped, irrelevant of what it is used for.
- ta988 5y ago
  We had the promise that this would change many years ago, I doubt it will change for many years to come.
  - rekoil 5y ago
    As of right now the Ethereum foundation are still projecting ~Q2 2022 for full Proof of Stake.
- buran77 5y ago
  PoW(hatever) is a cancer as long as the "Whatever" doesn't have any value behind it, it doesn't bring value to society because it's guaranteed to take resources without leaving anything useful behind. It incentivizes people to abuse anything at hand to obtain proof of that otherwise worthless "Whatever". Whether it's "work" or "space" or "time" then someone will always look to abuse others to obtain more proof without it creating any value. Unlike money (generically) PoWhatever cryptocurrencies aren't backed by anything anyone can define as valuable. Proof of Housing_built, Proof of Goods_transported, Proof of Music_created, Proof of Space_flights all create real value. Proof of Work where the work is without doubt useless in itself and an absolute net loss for society can't result in anything practically valuable. At best it results in a very wasteful Ponzi scheme. Imagine something as innocent as "proof of clapping hands", you may get some reward for holding a record but it's otherwise completely useless. That at least only affects you and your hands, even if a waste of time that doesn't seem to bring anything of value - joy or other practical benefits. What if someone could abuse you and force you to clap at the cost of lost productivity at work, health issues, etc. and the result of that work is... nothing?

tyjen 5y ago

This comment chain made me envision a potentially terrible future direction. Imagine a future where websites force people to consent to allowing them use your device to mine cryptocurrency while you use its services or browse its content instead of ads.

matthewaveryusa 5y ago
Frankly I would pick that over ads any day.
Invictus0 5y ago
Welcome to the future. The year is 2018. https://cyware.com/news/pirate-bay-found-running-browser-based-cryptocurrency-miner-to-generate-revenue-0e09e764 https://cyware.com/news/pirate-bay-found-running-browser-bas...
thehappypm 5y ago
Can you mine crypto in the browser? I know there are some native hooks, presumably JavaScript is never going to give a good hash rate, but it would be interesting if sites starting dropping JS tags that silently mined crypto in the background.
- kmeisthax 5y ago
  WASM Monero miners were a big problem years ago.
- causi 5y ago
  Oh certainly. Back in 2018 I found my favorite site to read online comics was turning my phone into a hot plate before I blocked JS.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  Certainly. https://github.com/jtgrassie/xmr-wasm https://github.com/jtgrassie/xmr-wasm Individually hash rate will be quite poor but if you make a mining pool out of all your users everything changes. Monero mining pools even have rules prohibiting that. https://minexmr.com/miningguide https://minexmr.com/miningguide > Botnet / Web Mining Policy > Sadly it happens that Botnets often run cryptominers on infected PCs. > minexmr does not support botnets, web miners or any other illegal activities. > Any account suspected of botnet mining or web mining will be banned.

snarf21 5y ago

Agreed, most of the world's ills could be mitigated with an extreme tax on digital advertising.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

danuker 5y ago

> because there is such a big economic incentive to abuse such free service. On my free personal blog, I have nothing for sale, and nobody discovers it in spite of the ones that do read it enjoying it. Another problem of advertising oligopolies monetizing everything is, if you don't pay them, you are invisible.

renewiltord 5y ago

But the example is untrue. The nerds are still hosting free content.

Atlas667 5y ago

It's incredible how much people can talk about capitalism without mentioning it. It's all about the trends in capital, but never about the general mode of capital. Which i do get to some extent. It does make sense to talk about trends, like advertising swallowing up all aspects of media, but critique can never be made on trends alone. Trends don't dictate processes, trends are the result of processes. If you look to explain this from the bottom up you'll hit a wall of individual decision making. But from the top down you see the influence behind those decisions, it's an economic choice that is necessitated to continue the process of capitalist accumulation in a corporation, country or even market. It's not only crypto or advertising it's the process of capital using technologies to radically transform its production process in search of more profits. Be it by established corporations or groups of crypto miners. This mode of production will do this to any technology that can advanced the generation of capital. This is the core of capitalism, the revolutionizing of production, not for humanities sake, but for profits sake. To settle on a single manifestation of this mode as its cause is to wear something like horse blinders and all conversations on the topic will be as narrow as the topic you want to hate on the most. And capital will keep chugging and keep using technology for its own sake at everyone's expense.