If this catches on it might spur alternate and less wasteful solutions, but until then I've been all for this.
It doesn't waste electricity. It uses a lot of electricity to create a secure global payment network that can solve the micropayments problem. Sacrificing efficiency for decentralization was a key design decision in Bitcoin.
YouTube cat videos and daytime television are genuine wastes of power. Humanity has to solve the power generation problem and processors are already far more power efficient than they were.
Ultimately cryptocurrencies have some value offering, but it's of dubious utility, because you can get 99% there with a little bit of trust, and then you don't have to pay this humongous upkeep in electricity.
Popularity of cryptocurrencies is almost entirely driven by greed, so it obscures the actual value of blockchain tech.
It’s technically possible, I mean nothing is stopping you from running mining code on your machine right now, but you would have little to no return on your electricity investment. Monero makes more sense.
To put this in perspective, a modern desktop CPU will do anywhere from 10 to 20 megahashes per second. A single ASIC will do 4 terahashes and up. The single ASIC is getting so many more bites at the pie that you would literally never mine a single block. Every single simultaneous Salon user could leave their browser open and the ASIC would out-hash their combined compute power in the blink of an eye. The developer time they’re spending on implementing this scheme would be better allocated by buying ASICs themselves!
> Monero is different. To mine Monero, you have to calculate hashes with an algorithm called Cryptonight. This algorithm is very compute heavy and – while overall pretty slow – was designed to run well on consumer CPUs.
> There are solutions to run the Cryptonight algorithm on a GPU instead, but the benefit is about 2x, not 10000x like for other algorithms used by Bitcoin or Ethereum. This makes Cryptonight a nice target for JavaScript and the Browser.
Someone™ is paying good greenbacks for irrefutable proof of me wasting kilowatts. The more I try to understand that part of the crypto value chain, the more bizarre it seems. "It's a store of value", i.e. Salon.com can later pay someone else with the same "proof of wasted cpu cycles"? What?!
The only thing people are actually using Bitcoin for right now is to sell to other people for more than they bought it (or maybe to sell for less than they bought it to launder money).
The total amount made by the buyers and sellers is zero (because every buyer is buying from a seller), and there has to be a constant inflow of new buyers just to cover the cost of the hardware and power.
And in this case, trust seems to be the underlying commodity.
Why is that proof of work of any value, to anyone?
Hard work, just for the sake of hard work, is a great ideal to the the previous generations - but we traditionally have based our economy on how much your work benefits someone, not how hard you worked.
Mining bitcoin is extremely hard, with precisely zero benefit. The only thing of value is the work itself. Quite zen, even.
1) Permission is requested first
2) The UX is good (it stays out of my way and doesn't slow down my device)
3) The mining finishes when I leave the site
Most of the problems with the modern web stem from the failure of browser vendors to implement a good user-centric permissions model. They all hold an unquestioned belief that more power in the platform is always better, and they've all spent the past 15 years kowtowing to developers, advertisers, and profit-motivated corporations instead of protecting their users from the above.
I want a simple, limited, fast, secure, document-centric platform which allows the site to request the execution of additional functions. Publishers unsurprisingly abuse the freedom they currently enjoy to throw up popovers on every page, secretly steal CPU cycles, load-on-demand videos that follow me as I scroll, and track every move I make online. I don't want any of that to work by default.
A common, well-intentioned argument against my point of view in the last few years has been that the web platform needs to compete with native mobile apps. That argument carried a lot more weight when everyone was installing tons of native apps. But increasingly we're at the point where we're sick of native apps for all the same reasons we're sick of the web -- they too are bloated attention + data thieves.
We need a true user-first platform. I'll pay for sites or apps on that platform, or I'll let them use my CPU to mine crypto. I just want them to not suck.
Microsoft, Mozilla and Apple could all lead the way in shipping browsers that are pro-user. Mozilla's got the heart for it, Microsoft and Apple have little to lose. Leaders at all these companies have failed to lead and demonstrate vision, relegating themselves to playing second fiddle to Google on the web because they think shitty popup ads will be the final word in web history.
I suggest that such creating a proper permission model isn't possible, because it isn't possible to determine the behavior of Turing complete programs without running them[1]. Browsers are currently chasing the impossible[2] goal of trying to enumerate badness - often only the known types of badness that fit their permission model.
> I want a simple, limited, fast, secure, document-centric platform
We had that: HTML, before Javascript. Allowing any Turing complete code to run at all will always be risky[3].
[1] halting problem
[2] http://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/editorials/d...
Has it though? Do you have any data to back up this assumption?
I can't find ANYONE who is tech illiterate who understands any of this stuff and those that I know are tech literate either don't notice or don't care about JavaScript. I've only ever met very, very few people who disable JavaScript and when they do it's always been piecemeal.
I haven't been able to find any statistics regarding who does and doesn't disable JavaScript, their group size, etc. It would be really interesting to know!
I have personally succeeded in convincing more people to disable javascript in the last few months than I have since Javascript was introduced in Netscape Navigator 2.0.
> this assumption?
I'm offering personal experience, not an assumption.
The miner is run in a WebWorker so shouldn't affect the UI response time.
Regardless of which UI, you do not know people are using their computer for, or how much free CPU they have available.
My friend's 1.2Ghz Core 2 Solo[1] laptop takes many seconds to reload locally hosted static HTML. Loading a youtube page takes >30s, sometimes far more. Anytime a webpage has CPU-bound Javascript - intentionally or not - the mouse becomes a lot harder to use. No, they are not buying a new laptop anytime soon; they live below the poverty line with student loans and medical expenses.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_2_microproc...
Brave is distributing this Token to the creators of the content you consume with the browser. Of course the user of brave needs to buy those tokens and in the end this is just a payment system for content, but it is a anonymous one and I would rather pay then have to run crypto miners on my laptop.
Doesn't sound like a particularly good idea, especially for laptop users.
I've been pushing this idea for over a year now (as my HN and other social media comment histories can attest), most recently:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16242816
I should have patented this when I first had it.
Waiting for streaming music and video to embed mining in their players...
Or websites pooling together to stabilizing income streams and provide bulk access.
The idea to rent computer time to a publisher in exchange for content can be taken further.
Problem solved? I think so.
Site owners have incentive to run this proxy so they're not marked as a mining site OR to circumvent the X% fee that coinhive/other cryptocurrency pools collect.
So the adblock/ublock origin fixes will only work until site owners decide to start proxying. IMO search providers should penalize sites with poor performance (as they already do) and site owners are penalized if they suck the consumers CPU.
edit: Fixed last sentence
I'd also suspect that it'll just lead to different ways of detecting miners (e.g. fingerprinting the behaviour of mining algorithms, or just blocking scripts that use more than a set CPU budget by default).
I'm mining 50 H/s
https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/calculator/xmr?HashingP...
Estimates in 24 hours I will generate 4 cents of revenue.
Just nope. If you want to block me from accessing your content with an adblocker active, go for it. But you aren't using my machine like this.
Without explicit agreement I wonder if it's even legal.
[1] https://www.salon.com/2017/12/06/bitcoin-could-cost-us-our-c...
Salon was founded in 1995 (and its close analogue Slate a year later). I guess that "new media" can encompass anything that was primarily digital from the start, but it still feels weird to see that tag applied to something that has been around for over two decades now.
Anyway, I rather lend them some CPU than get ads on my screen.
Is it clear what they're trying to mine? They have these silly feel-good examples like folding@home but it sounds more like they're going to be moving drug money for anarcho-capitalists like everyone else in this space. Probably Monero, right?
It doesn't sound like a lot, but even a dime or two per person adds up to more than these companies are seeing from the adblockers.
In my view, this will be part of the future of a somewhat ad-free internet.
The equivalent action is not “Salon buys their own mining rig”. The equivalent action is “you and a bunch of other readers kick in a buck, and then Salon buys a mining rig”.
I approve of their transparency, and I don't have a rational complaint against the method of revenue generation at the moment, but the last part there is an attempt to put lipstick on the pig
"Will my electricity bill go up or my laptop battery drain faster when I am participating?"
Can't help but think they omitted this on purpose.
I would totally do that since it is 26ºF right now and I am actually mining a shitcoin to heat my apartment. But you would need to have a easy to set a limit like 10% and back off (nice -19) so if I was doing heavy stuff it would throttle.
edit :: and I know minergate steals hashes. But the software is really nice.
Definitely feel it has an element of Bitcoin FOMO to it. The idea someone used their CPU could get rich off it angers people more than just a badly coded ad using the same amount of CPU.
(Not saying the anger isn't justified, purely an observation when really the power wastage is the same)
The only real argument against this is the environmental one, and it's a big one.
If browsers and sites could agree on a shared spec, it would provide great UX, with fine grained permissions, promoting well behaving websites while rate limiting others.
1) provides free content
2) provides content that's so irreplaceable that I will pay for it
3) dies
"We have noticed that processing in your browser is suspiciously slow; are you using a CPU blocker? ..."
There is no complex math problems being solved, it’s litteraly additions. I gringe my teeth everytime I hear that.
