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CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web browsers

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Re: CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web browsers

#121

Post by csomar »

rdlecler1 wrote: post #117

In the absence of an effective micropayment method, I could see this exchange of mining for content becoming main stream that replaces commercials. The cost to the viewer is ultimately a few cents of electricity, without the need for a bank account information, which the content producer indirectly turns into cash.

The problem is that mining through the browser is very inefficient. I don't have numbers but it'd probably cost an order of magnitude more, at least, to mine on the browser. And I'm talking about CPU cryptos, forget about bitcoin.

Re: CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web browsers

#122

Post by kuschku »

rdlecler1 wrote: post #117

In the absence of an effective micropayment method, I could see this exchange of mining for content becoming main stream that replaces commercials. The cost to the viewer is ultimately a few cents of electricity, without the need for a bank account information, which the content producer indirectly turns into cash.

> The cost to the viewer is ultimately a few cents of electricity

At US electricity prices.

At German electricity prices of 0.40$ per kWh, this is costing you a magnitude more than the site even gets.

Re: CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web browsers

#123

Post by kuschku »

sumitgt wrote: post #3

Actually, why is this not a potential legitimate business model? I let you stream content for free and you let me mine cryto-coins with your spare CPU cycles while you watch. Isn't that better for people who don't like all the tracking by ads?

So, you cut my phone’s battery runtime to nothing, cost me 10 to 100x more than you get yourself in electricity (German electricity prices are north of 0.40$ per kWh), and with a few dozen tabs my system crashes?

No thanks.

Re: CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web browsers

#124

Post by simias »

rdlecler1 wrote: post #117

In the absence of an effective micropayment method, I could see this exchange of mining for content becoming main stream that replaces commercials. The cost to the viewer is ultimately a few cents of electricity, without the need for a bank account information, which the content producer indirectly turns into cash.

The problem is that mining is effectively a zero-sum game (value of the underlying cryptocurrency notwithstanding). The more people mine the less each individual hash is worth.

If this becomes mainstream the overall difficulty of the cryptocurrency they're mining will raise making it less rewarding.

In other words you have a "micropayment" method where you can't really fix the price unless you're willing to force the user to mine for a certain amount of time before they can access the content. All I see is a good way to waste energy.

Re: CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web browsers

#125

Post by pr0gramm »

csomar wrote: post #121
rdlecler1 wrote: post #117

In the absence of an effective micropayment method, I could see this exchange of mining for content becoming main stream that replaces commercials. The cost to the viewer is ultimately a few cents of electricity, without the need for a bank account information, which the content producer indirectly turns into cash.

The problem is that mining through the browser is very inefficient. I don't have numbers but it'd probably cost an order of magnitude more, at least, to mine on the browser. And I'm talking about CPU cryptos, forget about bitcoin.

That may be true for Ethereum or Bitcoin, but not for Monero.

The Coinhive Monero miner is about 65% as fast as a native miner would be, at least in Browsers that support WASM.

Disclaimer: I wrote the Coinhive Monero miner.

Re: CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web browsers

#126

Post by simias »

sumitgt wrote: post #3

Actually, why is this not a potential legitimate business model? I let you stream content for free and you let me mine cryto-coins with your spare CPU cycles while you watch. Isn't that better for people who don't like all the tracking by ads?

Given the difficulty of mining any worthwhile cryptocurrency these days (even using GPU farms instead of a web browser running on a tablet or underpowered laptop) I doubt it'd generate enough revenue to make up for the loss of ads or other micropayment options.

Furthermore you can't even fix the price of the payment since you're at the mercy of the hash difficulty and the cryptocurrency value. Doesn't seem like a very good business model to me.

Re: CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web browsers

#127

Post by pr0gramm »

6nf wrote: post #72
quintin wrote: post #31

I’ve been running a miner via coin-hive.com. The earnings are ridiculously low. With 5 ad slots, I make around $6 RPM. With coin-hive/monero, it's not even equivalent to $0.5. Unless you are a website with the page open for hours and you have millions of views, this does not even make sense. Or maybe I am not doing this right.

Yes this is what I calculated as well. Regular ads are still way more profitable - even if you somehow convince all your visitors to keep your page open 24/7. Even coinhive admit that you can't use this to make real money.

If it's worth it depends on the site, your target audience and the ads you'd be allowed to show based on your content.

At this point, we (Coinhive) have paid out 992 XMR (about $89.000) to our users. We started this service 11 days ago.

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