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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?

#41

Post by s73v3r_ »

ves wrote: post #29
nikanj wrote: post #28

In the crypto money flow, I get to see the page for a $0,20 payment from me to my electricity company, but I'm still struggling to see the value transfer from the electricity company to Salon.com. Someone™ is paying good greenbacks for irrefutable proof of me wasting kilowatts. The more I try to understand that part of the crypto value chain, the more bizarre it seems. "It's a store of value", i.e. Salon.com can late…

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.

But does that hard problem actually do anything? If it was something like Folding@Home, I could see the value. It seems to me, the only “value” in this hard problem is to waste electricity.

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

#42

Post by SubiculumCode »

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.

This seem like a natural micropayment system that could free content producers from the need to rely on advertisments and tracking for income. That seems like a good thing, and a formalized method to do so within a browser could speed adoption.

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

#44

Post by seveibar »

PatchMonkey wrote: post #30

Adblock Plus has a cryptominer list. Yes, it does work in ublock origin. Problem solved? I think so.

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 search providers should penalize sites with poor performance (as they already do) and site owners are penalized if they suck the consumers CPU.

edit: Fixed last sentence

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

#45

Post by rspeer »

ves wrote: post #29
nikanj wrote: post #28

In the crypto money flow, I get to see the page for a $0,20 payment from me to my electricity company, but I'm still struggling to see the value transfer from the electricity company to Salon.com. Someone™ is paying good greenbacks for irrefutable proof of me wasting kilowatts. The more I try to understand that part of the crypto value chain, the more bizarre it seems. "It's a store of value", i.e. Salon.com can late…

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 of the hardware and power.

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

#46

Post by wskinner »

nikanj wrote: post #28

In the crypto money flow, I get to see the page for a $0,20 payment from me to my electricity company, but I'm still struggling to see the value transfer from the electricity company to Salon.com. Someone™ is paying good greenbacks for irrefutable proof of me wasting kilowatts. The more I try to understand that part of the crypto value chain, the more bizarre it seems. "It's a store of value", i.e. Salon.com can late…

It’s called proof of work: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

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

#47

Post by bdcravens »

jnordwick wrote: post #11

I want my cut! I've been pushing this idea for over a year now (as my HN and other social media comment histories can attest), most recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16242816 I should have patented this when I first had it. Waiting for streaming music and video to embed mining in their players... Or websites pooling together to stabilizing income streams and provide bulk access. The idea to rent computer…

Mining via Javascript happened back in 2011:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=9042.0

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

#48

Post by bdcravens »

stevenh wrote: post #18
jnordwick wrote: post #11

I want my cut! I've been pushing this idea for over a year now (as my HN and other social media comment histories can attest), most recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16242816 I should have patented this when I first had it. Waiting for streaming music and video to embed mining in their players... Or websites pooling together to stabilizing income streams and provide bulk access. The idea to rent computer…

Coinhive has been around for awhile.

Coinhive made it more viable, but this doable as early as 2011:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=9042.0

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

#49

Post by nikanj »

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…

Or, sell it after stealing it / mining it via botnet / etc.

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

#50

Post by BinaryIdiot »

pdkl95 wrote: post #22

The increased use of browser mining has made it a lot easier to convince people to globally disable Javascript (or install noscript/etc). Security concerns are rarely convincing, and tracking can be hard to explain, but paying for more electricity and worse UI response time are things people actually care about.

> The increased use of browser mining has made it a lot easier to convince people to globally disable Javascript (or install noscript/etc).

Has it though? Do you have any data to back up this assumption?

I can't find ANYONE who is tech illiterate who understands any of this stuff and those that I know are tech literate either don't notice or don't care about JavaScript. I've only ever met very, very few people who disable JavaScript and when they do it's always been piecemeal.

I haven't been able to find any statistics regarding who does and doesn't disable JavaScript, their group size, etc. It would be really interesting to know!

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