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Could cryptocurrency mining kill online advertising?

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Re: Could cryptocurrency mining kill online advertising?

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody would mine bitcoin in the browser in their right mind, it's a waste of resources. You would choose one of the coins made specifically for CPU/GPU mining only, no ASICs.

Mining doesn't have to be a cost efficient use of cpu cycles for the person browsing for this to catch on, it just needs to be a more cost efficient use of bandwidth and server power for the entity serving the ads. Bitcoins are the consistently valuable and liquid coin, therefore it can make sense to serve bitcoin mining js.

It will never be, and indeed nobody has bothered to make a bitcoin minibg js.

Why? Because each desktop CPU would only yield 20-30 megahashes per second, less if you don't want to slow the user's computer to a crawl. A server would need to manage millions of clients just to match a single ASIC miner which has efficiency rated in terahashes. And that amount of hash power would only return about 30 dollars in bitcoin on a good day.

This is why all javascript miners target Monero and the latter was often criticised for having a CPU-friendly PoW because this is just asking for botnets to form.

Re: Could cryptocurrency mining kill online advertising?

#52
post #47

Disclosure: I own Bitcoin, Dash, and Sia, but I've sold most of my Bitcoin. I'm surprised I even have to spell this out for people, but here goes: Mining stops the double spend problem just like market makers solve the liquidity problem: A little bit is great, but at scale it's divorced from the public good it provides. We don't need the amount of mining that is going on in Bitcoin right now. It's just wasted cycles…

Advertising will never go away. You pay for cable, yet cable still has ads. Micropayments could potentially be adopted as a short-term alternative, but if it were ever to become the status quo, publishers would just start adding advertisements on top. Then we'd have a system where we both pay money directly, and also have ads, which would be worse.

It doesn’t take that much machine learning to identify an ad and if micro payments were built into the browser they could be trivially tuned to only award payments on non-advertisers.

Re: Could cryptocurrency mining kill online advertising?

#53

Disclosure: I own Bitcoin, Dash, and Sia, but I've sold most of my Bitcoin. I'm surprised I even have to spell this out for people, but here goes: Mining stops the double spend problem just like market makers solve the liquidity problem: A little bit is great, but at scale it's divorced from the public good it provides. We don't need the amount of mining that is going on in Bitcoin right now. It's just wasted cycles…

Nobody would mine bitcoin in the browser in their right mind, it's a waste of resources. You would choose one of the coins made specifically for CPU/GPU mining only, no ASICs.

Of course not, but they can mine other coins that are more asic resistant.

Re: Could cryptocurrency mining kill online advertising?

#54
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advertising will never go away. You pay for cable, yet cable still has ads. Micropayments could potentially be adopted as a short-term alternative, but if it were ever to become the status quo, publishers would just start adding advertisements on top. Then we'd have a system where we both pay money directly, and also have ads, which would be worse.

It doesn’t take that much machine learning to identify an ad and if micro payments were built into the browser they could be trivially tuned to only award payments on non-advertisers.

This wouldn't solve the problem is payment is required up front for the content.

Re: Could cryptocurrency mining kill online advertising?

#57

Disclosure: I own Bitcoin, Dash, and Sia, but I've sold most of my Bitcoin. I'm surprised I even have to spell this out for people, but here goes: Mining stops the double spend problem just like market makers solve the liquidity problem: A little bit is great, but at scale it's divorced from the public good it provides. We don't need the amount of mining that is going on in Bitcoin right now. It's just wasted cycles…

Ads make content available to people with no money to spend. Restricting content to those who can pay, instead of paying by ad placement, is only going to further the divide between social classes.

Re: Could cryptocurrency mining kill online advertising?

#58
post #48
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this ever catches on, i have even more reason to disable all javascript while browsing on my laptop and on battery. As it is javascript is the number one reason for shit battery life, I don't want to make that even worse than the days of flash which its rapidly already become today.

until you hit SPA sites that need javascript to work.

That would be avoidable until I'm back on power.

Fundamentally the issue here is energy consumption while on battery. Without a way to say: a site can use N% of battery and then hard cap the usage down to a trickle and alerting the site that the user has limited energy resources available, I think this is a non starter.

Similar to when you are on LTE you don't want to use up limited bandwidth for say 4k video and want to say: you know what, I'll deal with this later and not go over my monthly allocation, the same applies here.

Is that view that unreasonable?

Re: Could cryptocurrency mining kill online advertising?

#59
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advertising will never go away. You pay for cable, yet cable still has ads. Micropayments could potentially be adopted as a short-term alternative, but if it were ever to become the status quo, publishers would just start adding advertisements on top. Then we'd have a system where we both pay money directly, and also have ads, which would be worse.

It doesn’t take that much machine learning to identify an ad and if micro payments were built into the browser they could be trivially tuned to only award payments on non-advertisers.

You can participate with this now using Brave, a Chromium-based browser that uses cryptocurrency-based micropayments to pay for content while blocking adds: https://brave.com

Re: Could cryptocurrency mining kill online advertising?

#60
This article's premise is about how we are on the edge of new disruption. They seem to think it's all been done rather than we are now sitting on innovations that require an unwritten playbook. Kinda like google, smart phones, or Amazon/eBay in the beginning. The talent pool is small again and specialized. The story is far from written.
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