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What happens when I choose to “Suppress Ads” on Salon?

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Re: What happens when I choose to “Suppress Ads” on Salon?

#91

Post by fauigerzigerk »

rspeer wrote: post #45
ves wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s just proof that you didn’t forge a scarce commodity. The value isn’t related to the wasted electricity, but the hard problem the electricity was used to solve. Love it or hate it, it makes sense.

It doesn't make sense because it's a negative-sum game. The only thing people are actually using Bitcoin for right now is to sell to other people for more than they bought it (or maybe to sell for less than they bought it to launder money). The total amount made by the buyers and sellers is zero (because every buyer is buying from a seller), and there has to be a constant inflow of new buyers just to cover the cost o…

You're right that crypto currencies are not productive assets and as such they are a negative-sum game.

But they have utility. At this point I think mostly for gamblers and criminals as you said yourself.

But they also have utility for all sorts of tinkerers, and via that route they may eventually become more useful to the rest of us.

Re: What happens when I choose to “Suppress Ads” on Salon?

#92

Post by mulmen »

staunch wrote: post #58
mandelbrotwurst wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're technically correct in that it does provide some value, but it is a waste in the sense that it is CPU mining which is far less efficient than mining with GPUS or ASICS.

There are proof of work algorithms that try to be ASIC-proof. And most visitors already have a CPU and GPU sitting idle. Something that used an extra 25% of your processors may not even be noticeable, and yet it could solve the fake news and clickbait problems.

Clickbait and fake news are not solely driven by advertising revenue so even if idle CPU and GPU had zero marginal cost crypto would not eliminate them. On top of that utilizing idle capacity is not free. The cost associated with crypto algorithms is real and must be evaluated in the context of what else could be done with the energy and compute resources. It’s not clear to me that crypto is the best use of our resources.

Re: What happens when I choose to “Suppress Ads” on Salon?

#93

Post by cimmanom »

dawnerd wrote: post #74
Nursie wrote: post #39

Great, more sites that will make my laptop sound like an aircraft taking off. Just nope. If you want to block me from accessing your content with an adblocker active, go for it. But you aren't using my machine like this. Without explicit agreement I wonder if it's even legal.

I would love it if browsers detected spikes in cpu usage and ask if you want to end the script, similar to when a page stops responding/locks up.

Firefox does do that.

Re: What happens when I choose to “Suppress Ads” on Salon?

#94

Post by VonGallifrey »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #37

It seems that a browser should be built that offers X mining power while visiting site in exchange for no ads or trackers. Instead of malware, mining could be a way to free the web of all its privacy ills.

I think browser developers should look at what Brave is doing with the Basic Attention Token instead.

Brave is distributing this Token to the creators of the content you consume with the browser. Of course the user of brave needs to buy those tokens and in the end this is just a payment system for content, but it is a anonymous one and I would rather pay then have to run crypto miners on my laptop.

Re: What happens when I choose to “Suppress Ads” on Salon?

#95

Post by imron »

dkarl wrote: post #33
perl4ever wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really everything you want? Because one thing that I can imagine wanting with micropayments is transparency about how much you are paying...

Not everything . But having this appear out of nowhere after years of waiting for micropayments for journalism is enough to make me gush like that.

Check out brave and brave payments.

Re: What happens when I choose to “Suppress Ads” on Salon?

#96

Post by perl4ever »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #36
perl4ever wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really everything you want? Because one thing that I can imagine wanting with micropayments is transparency about how much you are paying...

You can control how much is "spent" with with a cap on CPU utilization.

I'm not sure if that would slow the page down and make it unusable though. Prioritizing non-mining activity seems like it might be trickier than simply capping processor usage.

Although it's not quite the same thing, it makes me think of how bandwidth heavy pages are now. Once upon a time, I browsed the web on 56K, or even 14.4K. Now, when my phone gets throttled to 128K many sites are unbearable.

Re: What happens when I choose to “Suppress Ads” on Salon?

#97

Post by imron »

stevewillows wrote: post #80

For me, this calls back to a need for micro-transactions much like Flattr, but for all sites. Set your own category budget (e.g. $10/m for 'news'), and then the extension keeps tabs on the sites you visit and the categories they fall under. At the end of the month, the budget is divided up equally. It doesn't sound like a lot, but even a dime or two per person adds up to more than these companies are seeing from the…

Check out the brave browser and its payment settings.

Re: What happens when I choose to “Suppress Ads” on Salon?

#98

Post by squarefoot »

AstralStorm wrote: post #54
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can control how much is "spent" with with a cap on CPU utilization.

Browsers do not provide such caps for JS CPU usage. Maybe they should. This is extra bad when you're viewing on a phone, tablet or battery powered laptop.

All it needs is faking the available computing power to any process created by the browser, or run it into a VM with extremely limited resources.

Re: What happens when I choose to “Suppress Ads” on Salon?

#99

Post by TeMPOraL »

staunch wrote: post #32
dkarl wrote: post #5

This is everything I wanted from micropayments. Please, take my money rather than forcibly taking my attention and shoving garbage through my brain. Too bad it has to waste electricity, but at least it's not abusing my poor, finite, distractible, distortable brain. It's not precious to anyone else, but it's precious to me.

> Too bad it has to waste electricity... It doesn't waste electricity. It uses a lot of electricity to create a secure global payment network that can solve the micropayments problem. Sacrificing efficiency for decentralization was a key design decision in Bitcoin. YouTube cat videos and daytime television are genuine wastes of power. Humanity has to solve the power generation problem and processors are already far m…

Cat videos and daytime television waste less power while providing much more value.

Ultimately cryptocurrencies have some value offering, but it's of dubious utility, because you can get 99% there with a little bit of trust, and then you don't have to pay this humongous upkeep in electricity.

Popularity of cryptocurrencies is almost entirely driven by greed, so it obscures the actual value of blockchain tech.

Re: What happens when I choose to “Suppress Ads” on Salon?

#100

Post by TeMPOraL »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #91
rspeer wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't make sense because it's a negative-sum game. The only thing people are actually using Bitcoin for right now is to sell to other people for more than they bought it (or maybe to sell for less than they bought it to launder money). The total amount made by the buyers and sellers is zero (because every buyer is buying from a seller), and there has to be a constant inflow of new buyers just to cover the cost o…

You're right that crypto currencies are not productive assets and as such they are a negative-sum game. But they have utility. At this point I think mostly for gamblers and criminals as you said yourself. But they also have utility for all sorts of tinkerers, and via that route they may eventually become more useful to the rest of us.

Yeah, it's wrong to deny cryptocurrencies have utility. They do.

The real problem is the associated upkeep. If it were to get comparable in use with fiat, I believe Bitcoin would quite literally cook us all on this planet. The energy characteristics of crypto are unbounded from top, and this is seen as a feature - unlike normal financial systems, which try to minimize it.

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