Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners

#61

Post by Sir_Cmpwn » Sun, Sep 17, 2017, 9:23 PM UTC

rodorgas wrote: post #38

richdougherty wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In uBlock you can just click the big off button and then click it on again. I see that No Coin has a 'disable for 1 minute' button, which is slightly different, but probably not worth a separate extension for most people. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/How-to-whitelist-a-we...

OTOH I'm ok with ads, but not ok with miners. So wouldn't make sense have an ad blocker that doesn't block ads. People seems allergic to browser extensions this days. I also get the "why is this an extension and not a filter?" on a non ad-related extension.

You can turn off the filters in your adblocker and just enable a few select filters, like this one. This would be silly of you, since ads are a popular vector for spyware and malware, but hey, you can do it.

Extensions are also vectors for adware and malware so it's better to trust established extensions, and questioning an extension whose behvior could be trivially accomplished without is a reasonable concern to raise.

Re: Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners

#62

Post by raverbashing » Sun, Sep 17, 2017, 9:29 PM UTC

forthefuture wrote: post #12

slg wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as there is disclosure of it and the mining is relatively efficient, that is a very interesting business model. The site collects revenue relative to the amount of time users spend on the site and not the number of page/ad views. It is also a pretty seamless way to integrate micropayments from users into a site. Handing over a credit card number or similar is a big barrier to overcome while this requires no s…

I'd definitely prefer this to ads in a world where phone software and hardware improved energy capacity and efficiency at a faster rate than applications bloat. I don't think we've reached that point yet. An iPhone doesn't last a single day if you use it the whole time, it would barely last for hours mining constantly.

Are you using tpb in your phone? I don't see why that would be an issue then

Though I agree this monetization tactic doesn't work on mobile

Re: Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners

#63

Post by banku_brougham » Sun, Sep 17, 2017, 9:29 PM UTC

thinbeige wrote: post #60

Today I read that The Pirate Bay tested this new form of monetization (running a miner in you browser). I thought that might solve website monetization finally. We still have to figure out stuff like battery draining on mobile but it is the first step and I can buy some Monero which is well suited for JS/CPU mining (or in other words, it doesn't have a huge upside when mined on GPUs). And what do I see here? That bef…

better than ads and trackers, i agree. but shortly we'll be getting all three.

Re: Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners

#64

Post by oh_sigh » Sun, Sep 17, 2017, 9:32 PM UTC

It would be nice if there was some way to integrate charging status into this. I would be fine donating a few seconds of CPU/GPU time for an ad-free experience, but I would only want to do it if whatever device I was on was running off of wall power and not it's battery.

Re: Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners

#65

Post by tokenizerrr » Sun, Sep 17, 2017, 9:34 PM UTC

IamCarbonMan wrote: post #48

mattnewton wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what they would have to be mining to make cpu's or integrated GPU's make sense, certainly not bitcoin where even if you pay nothing for electricity to are unlikely to be able to do any useful work in the time someone visits your site.

PirateBay probably won't make any money. I'm considering adding this to an online game, which would probably generate a modest income. Video and social media sites could definitely benefit as well.

What game is that? I want to be sure to avoid it if you are planning such scummy tactics.

Re: Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners

#66

Post by mikeash » Sun, Sep 17, 2017, 9:35 PM UTC

Houshalter wrote: post #34

mikeash wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall that for Bitcoin, the profit was something like a billionth of a cent per user-hour. So it would be hard to be profitable even if all you're paying for is a little engineer time to deploy it. I assumed this whole notion of browser mining as a replacement for ads was just a laugh, but maybe not. Are there coins where it can actually make a noticeable amount of money?

Bitcoin quickly moved to GPUs and then ASICs, making mining them with CPUs pointless. Some coins are designed to be very difficult to mine with GPUs or ASICs, so a Browser based miner isn't so ridiculous. Wasm also makes it a bit faster.

What sort of return per user-hour would you be looking at with one of those?

Re: Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners

#67

Post by IamCarbonMan » Sun, Sep 17, 2017, 9:43 PM UTC

tokenizerrr wrote: post #65

IamCarbonMan wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PirateBay probably won't make any money. I'm considering adding this to an online game, which would probably generate a modest income. Video and social media sites could definitely benefit as well.

What game is that? I want to be sure to avoid it if you are planning such scummy tactics.

It's a card game simulator I have yet to publish. I don't really have a lot of money for server uptime, so it's either ads or this. And it won't be on by default. I'm simply offering users a way to support the site if they like using it, without having to view ads or pay directly (it may or may not affect their electricity bill I guess, but to most people an online game using some extra CPU isn't going to have much impact on them at all).

Re: Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners

#68

Post by narrowtux » Sun, Sep 17, 2017, 9:44 PM UTC

thinbeige wrote: post #60

Today I read that The Pirate Bay tested this new form of monetization (running a miner in you browser). I thought that might solve website monetization finally. We still have to figure out stuff like battery draining on mobile but it is the first step and I can buy some Monero which is well suited for JS/CPU mining (or in other words, it doesn't have a huge upside when mined on GPUs). And what do I see here? That bef…

I don't know. If you run those on a laptop you pretty much kill battery life, same thing with phones.

Re: Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners

#69

Post by tokenizerrr » Sun, Sep 17, 2017, 9:46 PM UTC

IamCarbonMan wrote: post #67

tokenizerrr wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What game is that? I want to be sure to avoid it if you are planning such scummy tactics.

It's a card game simulator I have yet to publish. I don't really have a lot of money for server uptime, so it's either ads or this. And it won't be on by default. I'm simply offering users a way to support the site if they like using it, without having to view ads or pay directly (it may or may not affect their electricity bill I guess, but to most people an online game using some extra CPU isn't going to have much i…

You can't afford $9/month? Don't bother implementing this feature and you earned a few months of uptime.

Re: Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners

#70

Post by paultopia » Sun, Sep 17, 2017, 9:47 PM UTC

Wait, people are actually doing this? Using client-side resources not to deliver content or applications to clients, or even to visibly deliver things like advertisements, but to divert user CPU cycles for their own purposes?

I want to know more about this. Are they seeking any kind of consent from the users, or even disclosing it to the users? If not, I have serious doubts about the legality of this behavior.