For context: The Pirate Bay is now launching a javascript-based Monero miner in all visitors' browsers to mine coins for them in the background (possibly as an alternative to ads).
As long as there is disclosure of it and the mining is relatively efficient, that is a very interesting business model. The site collects revenue relative to the amount of time users spend on the site and not the number of page/ad views. It is also a pretty seamless way to integrate micropayments from users into a site. Handing over a credit card number or similar is a big barrier to overcome while this requires no s…
> and the mining is relatively efficient
That's a huge "if"; it's my understanding that most cryptocurrencies are currently only efficient with ASICs.
Today I read that The Pirate Bay tested this new form of monetization (running a miner in you browser). I thought that might solve website monetization finally. We still have to figure out stuff like battery draining on mobile but it is the first step and I can buy some Monero which is well suited for JS/CPU mining (or in other words, it doesn't have a huge upside when mined on GPUs). And what do I see here? That bef…
I'd rather pay with my wallet than with my battery. And I'll pay only what I buy. Lock me out if I don't pay, or tell me to GTFO, and I'm totally fine with it, but you can't pick my hypotethical-pocket because I opened up your page. This is like charging window-shoppers. And like a sibling comment says, if this catches on, most web sites will do both, i.e. ads + client-side mining. One nice day publishing industry wi…
I'd argue that ads already pick your pocket just for window shopping the page.
There's no such thing as Adblock for video streams on Twitch anymore; the ads are burned into the stream, so you can't block them. (Hopefully YouTube won't switch to the same tech.)
Is that picking your pocket just for watching a video steam? If not, why is a video steam materially different from consuming a website?
As long as there is disclosure of it and the mining is relatively efficient, that is a very interesting business model. The site collects revenue relative to the amount of time users spend on the site and not the number of page/ad views. It is also a pretty seamless way to integrate micropayments from users into a site. Handing over a credit card number or similar is a big barrier to overcome while this requires no s…
> and the mining is relatively efficient That's a huge "if"; it's my understanding that most cryptocurrencies are currently only efficient with ASICs.
Bitcoin, sure. Many are resistant and are still mined with GPUs though.
Use of excessive resources should be a privileged action, isn't something like coinhive a malicious vector?
No more than the existing trend of 'web app' entirely Javascript rendered websites. My solution to both is very simple: I run JS only from white-listed domains. Sure this breaks many sites but, well, fuck those sites.
None of that comment even close to makes sense. 1. My operating costs are more than $9/month. I don't know where you got that presumed feature but it's wrong. 2. There's nothing to implement. You include a library and a few lines of code to start it and you're done. 3. How would not doing something that could potentially make me money, even if only a little bit, save me money? That makes zero sense.
You are talking about server costs. Get a server at for example online.net (not affiliated) for $9/month or cheaper. That server is going to be able to run your card game easily. You don't need to spend hundreds of dollars on AWS.
You don't know what my site requires, so you're assuming that whatever hosting you just randomly want to assume is sufficient is enough and so you can discredit my legitimate idea for a possible way to get the required cost to run my site, and possibly also make a little profit. Would you rather have me borrow user's time and attention with ads, or bottom a few of their precious millions of CPU cycles per second? And in case you didn't read what I wrote, I'm not "stealing" anything. The site will be hosted either way, if I have to pay for it out of pocket at a loss then fine. But if people would like to donate CPU time to support the project, there is an off-by-default option to do so, just like there's an off-by-default option to donate money. I fail to see how this is evil.
Today I read that The Pirate Bay tested this new form of monetization (running a miner in you browser). I thought that might solve website monetization finally. We still have to figure out stuff like battery draining on mobile but it is the first step and I can buy some Monero which is well suited for JS/CPU mining (or in other words, it doesn't have a huge upside when mined on GPUs). And what do I see here? That bef…
Ugh...no. The carbon footprint of cryptocurrencies is already borderline-unconscionable, and that's with purpose-built hardware that achieves efficiency beyond what consumer-grade equipment can. Moving mining onto consumer hardware and implementing it in JavaScript is a huge step backwards.
I'd rather pay with my wallet than with my battery. And I'll pay only what I buy. Lock me out if I don't pay, or tell me to GTFO, and I'm totally fine with it, but you can't pick my hypotethical-pocket because I opened up your page. This is like charging window-shoppers. And like a sibling comment says, if this catches on, most web sites will do both, i.e. ads + client-side mining. One nice day publishing industry wi…
I'd argue that ads already pick your pocket just for window shopping the page. There's no such thing as Adblock for video streams on Twitch anymore; the ads are burned into the stream, so you can't block them. (Hopefully YouTube won't switch to the same tech.) Is that picking your pocket just for watching a video steam? If not, why is a video steam materially different from consuming a website?
> the ads are burned into the stream, so you can't block them.
In uBlock you can just click the big off button and then click it on again. I see that No Coin has a 'disable for 1 minute' button, which is slightly different, but probably not worth a separate extension for most people. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/How-to-whitelist-a-we...
OTOH I'm ok with ads, but not ok with miners. So wouldn't make sense have an ad blocker that doesn't block ads. People seems allergic to browser extensions this days. I also get the "why is this an extension and not a filter?" on a non ad-related extension.
Things is, all the funcionality to block certain content has already been created and tested (at length) in uBlock Origin.
Using a different addon for exactly the same purpose but for different content is the worst kind of separation of concerns.
Today I read that The Pirate Bay tested this new form of monetization (running a miner in you browser). I thought that might solve website monetization finally. We still have to figure out stuff like battery draining on mobile but it is the first step and I can buy some Monero which is well suited for JS/CPU mining (or in other words, it doesn't have a huge upside when mined on GPUs). And what do I see here? That bef…
Website owners are free to attempt this business model. I am free to choose what code runs on my machine.
Every business model has trade-offs, and no model guarantees income.