CPU for services seems legit as long as they give an affirmative checkoff.
It's stealing money from the user via their electricity bill.
Not really if it's at Starbucks
Starbucks in-store wifi provider in Buenos Aires uses CoinHive
41–50 of 67 posts
Re: Starbucks in-store wifi provider in Buenos Aires uses CoinHive
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think anyone mines for bitcoins by themselves anymore - they join a pool so you get a small guaranteed payout.
I have no interest in a small guaranteed payout. I'm asking if I have $20 to buy Powerball tickets (with a chance to win $1 billion) or $20 to buy electricity for my i5-based mining machine, how do the odds compare?
I'm not sure what the exact house edge is on Powerball. But let's say it's 20%.
Due to dynamic difficulty adjustments, the profit for miners is just a bit more than the cost of electricity. However, this is only true for those who have the best specialized mining equipment and the cheapest electricity in the world. For an average person living in a typical area, even with dedicated equipment, you'd probably be far under breaking even. Most likely much less than 20%.
And that's with specialized equipment (costing thousands of dollars). With your home computer, it'll be hundreds of thousands of times less efficient per watt of electricity to mine bitcoin. Even for other cryptocurrencies that might be resistant to specialized equipment, you'd still most likely be over 10x less efficient.
Go with the powerball tickets.
Re: Starbucks in-store wifi provider in Buenos Aires uses CoinHive
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am by no means an expert, but my understanding is that a personal computer isn't energy/heat efficient enough to make a profit from mining. It costs more in energy than you would make from the bitcoin. My friends who do some mining have told me the same. You're competing with computers that are made exclusively for bitcoin and people who are heavily investing their time into it so it makes sense. It would probably…
Jeez, you're completely missing the point. The GP was asking for a comparison the odds/cost of mining a coin with the odds/cost of winning the lottery. Not about "investing," and not about "making a profit." Basically, which form of gambling is better from a cost/rewards perspective.
My understanding is you are always outspending on energy costs because of the energy inefficiency of personal computers for mining vs. a dedicated machine. So the chance of return would be more or less 0%. More like, "If I pay $5 for a lottery ticket where the max I can win is $4, what are my chances of profiting?"
But again, not an expert. Just the articles I've read and people I know who mine bitcoin say you can't profit that way.
Re: Starbucks in-store wifi provider in Buenos Aires uses CoinHive
#44Does anyone have an idea of the ROI on this? I'm thinking you'd need a massive number of 10 second to mine any meaningful number of BTC on consumer laptops.
Coinhive estimates that a user with a mid-range laptop would have a hashrate of 30 h/s. 10 minutes of mining = 30 * 10 * 60 = 18,000 hashes Since Coinhive pays out 0.000090 XMR per million hashes (current rate as of Dec 11. 2017), that's $0.0004250394 per user (18000/1000000 * 0.000090 * 262.37). In order to make $1, you would need 2,353 visitors with laptops mining for 10 minutes each.
I’m guessing this would work extremely well if it were set up as a honey pot at University? Tempted to test it.
Re: Starbucks in-store wifi provider in Buenos Aires uses CoinHive
#45How much Monero can a company reasonably mine using this tactic?
Re: Starbucks in-store wifi provider in Buenos Aires uses CoinHive
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Jeez, you're completely missing the point. The GP was asking for a comparison the odds/cost of mining a coin with the odds/cost of winning the lottery. Not about "investing," and not about "making a profit." Basically, which form of gambling is better from a cost/rewards perspective.
My understanding is you are always outspending on energy costs because of the energy inefficiency of personal computers for mining vs. a dedicated machine. So the chance of return would be more or less 0%. More like, "If I pay $5 for a lottery ticket where the max I can win is $4, what are my chances of profiting?" But again, not an expert. Just the articles I've read and people I know who mine bitcoin say you can't…
In my understanding, there is continuously a chance (when mining solo) that you mine a Bitcoin block. If that happens (unlikely with consumer hardware) you make a lot of money at once since you get a whole block.
Re: Starbucks in-store wifi provider in Buenos Aires uses CoinHive
#47One of the big problems I have with this (and with mining, in general) is that it's attempting to create value by simply wasting electricity . Come on, we should not be spending CPU cycles just for the sake of spending CPU cycles...
You may find GridCoin interesting. GridCoin rewards miners for running scientific computations for a variety of projects.
CureCoin & Golem are two other coins that try to use the cpu cyles for something other than heat.
Re: Starbucks in-store wifi provider in Buenos Aires uses CoinHive
#48One of the big problems I have with this (and with mining, in general) is that it's attempting to create value by simply wasting electricity . Come on, we should not be spending CPU cycles just for the sake of spending CPU cycles...
Using this logic, dollars are creating value by wasting paper and metal. What you're ignoring is the value of having a publicly auditable ledger of transactions and a decentralized currency. That _isn't_ a waste of electricity.
There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of cryptocurrency; this just isn't a good one.
Re: Starbucks in-store wifi provider in Buenos Aires uses CoinHive
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Coinhive estimates that a user with a mid-range laptop would have a hashrate of 30 h/s. 10 minutes of mining = 30 * 10 * 60 = 18,000 hashes Since Coinhive pays out 0.000090 XMR per million hashes (current rate as of Dec 11. 2017), that's $0.0004250394 per user (18000/1000000 * 0.000090 * 262.37). In order to make $1, you would need 2,353 visitors with laptops mining for 10 minutes each.
I’m guessing this would work extremely well if it were set up as a honey pot at University? Tempted to test it.
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