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I know HN froths at the mouth on this topic.. But Cryptominers/Hashcash are also an alternative. It's only been made non-viable due to the major players who dep
by geokon 3y ago
I know HN froths at the mouth on this topic.. But Cryptominers/Hashcash are also an alternative. It's only been made non-viable due to the major players who depend on ad-supremacy making sure all browsers fingerprint and block them
- scrollaway 3y agoIt’s also a huge waste of energy at a time when the planet is on fire.
- geokon 3y agoit's got some downsides - but so does the alternative. Have you considered the harmful effects of advertisement on society? I think people's cellphone warming up a bit is a smaller price to pay
- JoshTriplett 3y agoThat's a false dichotomy: cryptominers are not the only alternative to ads.
- geokon 3y agothat was literally what the parent comment said: "This is why ads are the only viable business model". No alternative to ads has been really made viable. Fattr shutting down makes the point
- rcxdude 3y agoIt's a terrible option. Cryptomining in a browser is pure banditry: it's incredibly inefficient to the point the user loses way, way more than the site gains, and it provides basically nothing to crypto.
- geokon 3y agoWhy is it banditry.. you can opt out of going to the website. I think you're not looking at the alternative objectively.. Ads are pure brain rot that just make society worse while providing virtually nothing useful to "the user"
- Jochim 3y agoIf you're robbed by bandits you can choose not to travel on that road again. That doesn't mean that you weren't robbed the first time.
- stonogo 3y agoYour description of ads is my description of cryptocurrency.
- JoshTriplett 3y agoThe alternative to ads isn't cryptominers. The alternative is adblockers, which also block cryptominers and other unwanted malware.
- colesantiago 3y agoNo. We shouldn't have to make the world infinitely worse place and waste billions in energy just to squeeze out a cent in 'magic internet money' to give to another person.
- teekert 3y agoI think you're not wrong. There is the BTC Lightning network which burns A LOT less energy and the low transfer costs make it feasible to stream fractions of cents. Ie. when listening to a podcast via Podcasting 2.0 app (like Podverse). Btw, I upvoted you, all the frothing was fading out your reply. BTC Lightning is one of those babies people want to wash away with the bathwater. Or perhaps it's the only one I know so far. I do agree 99.99% of "crypto" is shitcoin scams.
- geokon 3y agoIt's less about transfer fees. I'm not saying you should make microtransactions to visit webpages. I'm more imagining a mining-pool made up of webpage visitors. The website allocates you certain blocks of hashes to be calculated and you calculate those. Once they're calculated and the webpage verifies it by randomly double checking a few, then the webpage is served. A websearch tell me a webpage visit nets the owners about ~2 cents in ad revenue. So you just need to mine some equivalent amount. It'd be sort of like a mining-pool where the overwhelming majority of users don't successfully mine a block - but when someone does the website owner gets the coin. You could get more sophisticated on top of that and have some central mining-pool coordinator and session cookies etc so that your mining credit transfers across webpages and you can "premine" certain amounts So the currency becomes more granular at "how many hashes have you calculated" and not how many coins do you have I could be wrong though ~ It's possible 2 cents of hashes takes hours to crunch on a phone