Idea: Screensavers with a bitcoin miner. Like SETI@home. Bitcoin@home!
But who would get the coin?
Javascript Bitcoin Miner
21–30 of 152 posts
Re: Javascript Bitcoin Miner
#22Very interested to see if this could actually be an alternative to ad revenue.
I don't think the fundamentals are sound here. Advertising spurs commerce, which creates value. This wastes electricity, slows down users' computers, and does no valuable computation. It seems closer to stealing from your users (with enormous inefficiency) than something that creates any real value.
Amen. You spend, on average, say $1-$10 to acquire a customer, but you lose them in a dramatic, angry, disgusted fashion by trying to steal $0.000001 from them.
Re: Javascript Bitcoin Miner
#23Javascript is way too slow compared to GPU, by at least a factor of 1000 or more. If you have 1M daily unique visitor and you manage to "steal" 10 CPU seconds from each of them, the amount of work would be equivalent to 1e6 * 10 / 1000 = 10000 seconds which is about 2.8 hours of one dedicated GPU-based mining machine.
for now. webcl support is not far off, and that's when this could get quite interesting
WebCL makes about as much sense as AwkOS.
Re: Javascript Bitcoin Miner
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think the fundamentals are sound here. Advertising spurs commerce, which creates value. This wastes electricity, slows down users' computers, and does no valuable computation. It seems closer to stealing from your users (with enormous inefficiency) than something that creates any real value.
By your logic gold mining is overrated, too.
Not according to cost/benefit analysis.
Re: Javascript Bitcoin Miner
#25Very interested to see if this could actually be an alternative to ad revenue.
Using http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php : On my computer (netbook running Chrome in Ubuntu), bitp.it clocks at 2.2khash/sec. Using this, I'll give 2000hash/sec/user as a conservative estimate. If you had 1M daily visits, averaging about 1 minute of interaction (high, but assuming you have long-form content), you'd have 12000Mhash/day, or about 2.77Mhash/sec. Plugging this in with current rates, this end…
And you get tons of angry visitors.
Re: Javascript Bitcoin Miner
#26Javascript is way too slow compared to GPU, by at least a factor of 1000 or more. If you have 1M daily unique visitor and you manage to "steal" 10 CPU seconds from each of them, the amount of work would be equivalent to 1e6 * 10 / 1000 = 10000 seconds which is about 2.8 hours of one dedicated GPU-based mining machine.
for now. webcl support is not far off, and that's when this could get quite interesting
it's here now if you don't mind using a plugin: http://webcl.nokiaresearch.com/
Re: Javascript Bitcoin Miner
#27Re: Javascript Bitcoin Miner
#28Javascript is way too slow compared to GPU, by at least a factor of 1000 or more. If you have 1M daily unique visitor and you manage to "steal" 10 CPU seconds from each of them, the amount of work would be equivalent to 1e6 * 10 / 1000 = 10000 seconds which is about 2.8 hours of one dedicated GPU-based mining machine.
Actually, regular CPU miners are nearly 1,000 times slower than GPU miners. I wouldn't be surprised if a JavaScript miner was several orders of magnitude slower than that (ie. a million times slower than GPU miners). What about using gamers' excess GPU to mine Bitcoins in an installable massively-multiplayer game? Is anyone trying this?
I wonder when will the bitcoin mining viruses appear. If done stealthily they could use spare resources and fall back when other GPU/CPU intensive task is launched. Such virus could be quite profitable if it spread widely enough.
Re: Javascript Bitcoin Miner
#29It is bad to use a bunch of the user's CPU without any notice. They will probably notice that your site makes their computer slow and never come back again. Also, once they find out you've been using their CPU power/electricity/battery life surreptitiously for private, unshared gain, you will probably have some angry customers. Additionally, does this automatically hook in to slush's pool or something? Bitcoin mining…
And I should add that the prospects of finding any meaningful amount of shares, while much better than finding a block, are still quite low. My GPU can find a couple of shares per minute in a good minute, but it operates at 55.5Mhash, over 10x faster than my CPU (i7-2600K). Consider that most are going to have really slow CPUs and share the processor power with other heavy applications (Flash games), and you might get one share from the best computers in an average 10-20 minute visit if you're lucky. Shares are worth increasingly little and it depends on how you calculate what each share is worth (since btc generation is really totally based on blocks and each pool decides the value / share on its own, etc.), but I really doubt this is a viable replacement for advertisements or any other money-making endeavor for anyone, even the largest websites where people spend lots of time (Facebook, gmail).
Re: Javascript Bitcoin Miner
#30Anyone care to calculate the actual expected revenue you could get from this?
If you have an average consumer box and leave this running during the day, a few USD a year at current exchange rates.
Not even that much.
On my old laptop I get a little more than 1000 hash. Assuming that average computer is twice as fast as mine we get 2 khash/s. Inserting it in the calculator [1] shows that it would take 6068212 days on average to calculate one block of 50 bitcoins. That is 332.5 years per bitcoin. At current rate it means $0.02 per year.