Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 269 posts

Re: Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners

#151

Post by tokenizerrr »

IamCarbonMan wrote: post #143
tokenizerrr wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like olyou should take a refresher ethics course. And if not that, a business course because you're just going to drive your idea into the ground the way you're going. There's your feedback. By the way, users will instantly close your game if you cause their cpu fans to spin up to 100% Good luck with your doomed project :)

You do know what throttling and debouncing are right? Or do you need to take an actual computer science class?

Of course. I also know you're not going to earn any remotely significant amount of money from crypto currency mining if you do that.

Re: Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners

#152

Post by andai »

paultopia wrote: post #70

Wait, people are actually doing this? Using client-side resources not to deliver content or applications to clients, or even to visibly deliver things like advertisements, but to divert user CPU cycles for their own purposes? I want to know more about this. Are they seeking any kind of consent from the users, or even disclosing it to the users? If not, I have serious doubts about the legality of this behavior.

In 2015 I had the idea to start a meme aggregator and use it as a distributed JS computer where visitors are the nodes. I just didn't know what to do with it. Until now!

Re: Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners

#153

Post by slig »

einrealist wrote: post #93
slig wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally, checking the solution is trivial. Hashing billions of hashings to find what you want is want takes resources.

So when I intercept the script and send a bad proof back, it would not do any harm? So no https://xkcd.com/327/ for the bad miners? I guess, we need browser extensions that just send the correct proof to my own wallet then?

The bad proof can be trivially checked and discarded.

If you want the results of the mining it makes more sense to run yourself with a native miner than run on the browser.

This coinhive thing only makes sense [to run on a browser] because they're exploiting the resources (hardware and electricity) from the visitors.

Re: Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners

#154

Post by guscost »

tokenizerrr wrote: post #114
IamCarbonMan wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ads obviously, as long as you're not using them to spread different kind of malware. It doesn't matter that much to me personally, I'll be blocking whatever garbage you put out anyway, but ads are objectively the better choice as they dont needlessly wreck the environment any further, nor cause unnecessary wear and tear on the hardware of your users. Anyway, I'd be very interested in hearing how a card game simulator…

> Ads obviously

You'd have a better argument if the TechCrunch homepage didn't use 50% of my CPU just to render all the ads.

Re: Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners

#155

Post by ringaroundthetx »

paultopia wrote: post #70

Wait, people are actually doing this? Using client-side resources not to deliver content or applications to clients, or even to visibly deliver things like advertisements, but to divert user CPU cycles for their own purposes? I want to know more about this. Are they seeking any kind of consent from the users, or even disclosing it to the users? If not, I have serious doubts about the legality of this behavior.

hm yes this has been going on for years from anonymous services. remember the WannaCry exploit? another group was already using the same exploit to mine monero, it was more profitable than WannaCry's global clusterf* and fixing WannaCry merely exposed the other group's mining operation, and cut it off when the patches rolled out.

the only thing new is known organizations trying to do it for revenues.

Re: Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners

#156

Post by tokenizerrr »

guscost wrote: post #154
tokenizerrr wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ads obviously, as long as you're not using them to spread different kind of malware. It doesn't matter that much to me personally, I'll be blocking whatever garbage you put out anyway, but ads are objectively the better choice as they dont needlessly wreck the environment any further, nor cause unnecessary wear and tear on the hardware of your users. Anyway, I'd be very interested in hearing how a card game simulator…

> Ads obviously You'd have a better argument if the TechCrunch homepage didn't use 50% of my CPU just to render all the ads.

I mean isn't 50% better than the 100% that these crypto miners do? And those miners keep going for as long as you have the page open, not just while scrolling.

Of course inefficient ads are also horrible.

Re: Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners

#158

Post by guscost »

tokenizerrr wrote: post #156
guscost wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ads obviously You'd have a better argument if the TechCrunch homepage didn't use 50% of my CPU just to render all the ads.

I mean isn't 50% better than the 100% that these crypto miners do? And those miners keep going for as long as you have the page open, not just while scrolling. Of course inefficient ads are also horrible.

What if you could choose a "support level" or unlock features by donating more resources? I'm thinking out loud here, but I've never heard of customer-donated CPU as a business model and there might be something here. For an author trying to monetize content online all of the "normal" options are pretty bad right now. I think most digital entertainment just isn't very valuable these days, but I'll bet the mining thing has some characteristics that compare favorably to both ads and (micro)payments.

Of course, if it was a viable strategy, wouldn't some malware authors write the malware to do this instead of ransoming files? Has that been tried? Is it a thing?

Re: Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners

#159

Post by tokenizerrr »

guscost wrote: post #158
tokenizerrr wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean isn't 50% better than the 100% that these crypto miners do? And those miners keep going for as long as you have the page open, not just while scrolling. Of course inefficient ads are also horrible.

What if you could choose a "support level" or unlock features by donating more resources? I'm thinking out loud here, but I've never heard of customer-donated CPU as a business model and there might be something here. For an author trying to monetize content online all of the "normal" options are pretty bad right now. I think most digital entertainment just isn't very valuable these days, but I'll bet the mining thin…

The main problem for legitimate operations is that the user will spend far more on electricity than what the site operator will earn, especially with implementations running in the browser which still aren't yet able to be as performant as you would like. With that in mind a direct exchange of currency for features/access makes a lot more sense unless you want to trick your users. Most won't realize why their power bill is so high.

There are malwares that mine crypto currencies, usually while the machine is idle as to not alert the user that something is up with their machine. However these profits are also quite low since you're using mostly low end machines.

Crypto lockers are of course way more evil, but they function just as well on low quality hardware so I can understand why malware authors do it.

Post reply on HN