Could cryptocurrency mining kill online advertising?

Depends on the traffic of the website and how long the visitors stay on it.

According to coinwarz you can make $5.1 for 24 hours of mining on CPU/GPU, but realistically (for an average visitor) probably closer to $1/24hrs. If we take Reddit, which has 13 minutes average visit, probably between 5M and 50M daily visits.

That's $45K - $451K daily revenue.

That's probably more than their ad revenue.

https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/reddit-stats/

I'm sure they meant Coinhive, not Coinbase.

Although outraged by the idea at first, I have to say that there are some benefits here:

0. This starves the advertising industry, which has insatiable apatite for private information, and questionable practices of obtaining it.

1. Payment is done using only CPU power and you electric bill which are private, and the process itself could be made secure and efficient by incorporating it into browsers.

2. Sites no longer have to trick you or your ad blocker into watching something you don't want to watch (or clicking on it). Instead, they are motivated to keep you on their site longer. It's not perfect, and trickery still might be involved, but it still seems like a better motivation. Heck, some sites might even try to keep you by producing solid content.

3. Journalists get an income source without any political strings attached, they don't have to worry about writing something bad about some major advertiser.

However, I'm really not sure about the economics of all of this. How many CPU cycles does it take to replace a single ad?

Plus, wasting all of those CPU cycles on mining produces nothing of actual value. I'd much rather auction off some of my CPU time to the highest bidder or contribute it to some worthy cause.

I think this would be more beneficial if we thought of it as distributed computing, rather than just cryptocurrency mining. Look at projects like BOINC, and imagine for a moment that those tasks could run in a web browser without slowing things down to a crawl.

Sure it's less efficient and the tasks need to be broken down into much smaller chunks, but at least this way your spare CPU power could be auctioned off to some more useful purpose. What if instead of an ad space, you're running protein folding simulations, or rendering frames for a small art studio's film project? I'd gladly donate my spare CPU cycles for those kinds of projects on purpose. I think there's a market for this kind of thing, and I'd like to see more experimentation.

> What fundamental good does spreading any PoW to millions or billions of devices accomplish? Nothing.

Well, if the owners of those devices control the mining they're doing, then it secures the network by preventing a 51% attack from any single miner with enough power. But in this case, only the website operator benefits by not having to pay for electricity.