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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?

#131

Post by splintercell »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #99
staunch wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Keep it in mind that Proof of Work is necessary for this initial world of decentralized trust to be created, but after that, it is not necessary. Nearly all the other cryptocurrencies can bootstrap themselves using bitcoin and following Proof of Stake or some other non-PoW algorithm.

Even if Bitcoin dies, we still don't need to bring PoW again.

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

#132

Post by seveibar »

stordoff wrote: post #118
seveibar wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty easy to proxy the request to a cryptocurrency miner pool through the web server of the main site. e.g. https://github.com/cazala/coin-hive-proxy Site owners have incentive to run this proxy so they're not marked as a mining site OR to circumvent the X% fee that coinhive/other cryptocurrency pools collect. So the adblock/ublock origin fixes will only work until site owners decide to start proxying. IMO sea…

Is that not currently the case with ads, and addressed by blocking certain scripts/elements even if they originate from the same site? I'd also suspect that it'll just lead to different ways of detecting miners (e.g. fingerprinting the behaviour of mining algorithms, or just blocking scripts that use more than a set CPU budget by default).

Detecting a similar script should prevent the proxying from working, but if the script is bundled into the main JS of the site (as many sites do now) it would be basically impossible to stop w/o blocking JS altogether.

Not sure if browsers can fingerprint script execution patterns, that's way further down than I go.

Script blocking will probably work most of the time, just as blocking certain urls gets rid of most ads.

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

#134

Post by dawnerd »

cimmanom wrote: post #93
dawnerd wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hmmm haven't noticed it but I don't use it too much, just for testing. Might have to switch for a while to see if I like it.

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

#135

Post by lrns_ »

pjc50 wrote: post #78
lrns_ wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell that to a Venezuelan, who can provide a family with a single antminer. It will make sense to you in 5 years.

How exactly? Who is doing this? Withdrawal from exchanges into Venezuela? Who is buying bitcoins for Bolivars? How did the family get the capital asset of an antminer in the first place? How are they paying for electricity? How is this sustainable? Why is a random family able to compete with businesses that have real economy of scale, rather than having their margin driven to zero?

https://hackernoon.com/extortion-police-raids-and-secrecy-in...

https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins/VEF (example of local trading)

Remittances, family abroad (easy via BTC to circumvent restrictions). Bitcoin is stable compared to a hyper inflation of +2,616%.

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

#136

Post by Nursie »

cimmanom wrote: post #93
dawnerd wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AFAICT firefox does that when it starts causing problems for the page, and causing unresponsiveness, but not just for processor spikes.

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

#137

Post by lrns_ »

rspeer wrote: post #66
lrns_ wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell that to a Venezuelan, who can provide a family with a single antminer. It will make sense to you in 5 years.

Your feel-good story about Venezuela is unrelated to what I said.

Excuse me. Was more a reaction on "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)."

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

#138

Post by infogulch »

seanwilson wrote: post #24
jnordwick wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather pay 10 cents than waste 20 cents in electricity. There just isn't good way to really do that easily and transparently.

Half-baked thoughts here, but the way I thought of it is you'd "top-up" your browser with say $10 a month and it would be distributed to sites you've viewed or chosen to donate to. There's obvious questions with privacy though and sites trying to game the system if it's view count based. I think most people wouldn't be against a small monthly payment to avoid seeing ads but you'd need to do it in a way that was simpl…

This is the Flattr model https://flattr.com/ that they recently moved to. I wish they moved to this model years ago, but I guess it was too soon for the time.

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

#139

Post by SubiculumCode »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #121
SubiculumCode wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand this point. But on the other hand, it is not necessarily wasting cpu power. It is converting CPU power to payment for content, as a type of seamless micropayment, not requiring punching in credit card numbers, 3rd parties, setting up accounts etc. Some browser-based standardization of a unit of cycles per view might be established. I don't know, just exploring. The current state of the internet kind of s…

It's wasting CPU/GPU cycles and battery power, vastly more than would be used for a simple micropayment with actual currency. I refuse to participate in the degradation of my devices' performance as "payment".

More than the current system of loading thousands of ad networks?

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

#140

Post by dozzie »

stordoff wrote: post #113
staunch wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is there a way to be ASIC-proof without being less efficient? I'm not 100% familiar with it, but my base level understanding was that you are adding more work (e.g. memory access) to nullify the raw compute advantage of ASICs. Further, I'm not sure how it would solve clickbait. Surely clickbait => more clicks => more people running your miner (just as it currently leads to more ad. views)?

The thing is, finding a nonce that with given payload gives a hash ending with predefined number of zero bits has only one purpose: so everybody is very slow in computing it, but everybody is very fast in verifying. You can trade it for any other difficult problem that's easy to verify (anything NP-complete will do, assuming P != NP), you just need to find encoding that maps a payload into a problem instance.

In other words, you could replace proof of work with finding the largest clique in a graph, and try doing that in ASIC.

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