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Comment by baron816 | Hacker News Reader

A bit off topic, but something I'm interested in: would it be possible for a website to generate revenue by using client machines to mine crypto currencies? I would rather go to a website that uses up my CPU and network resources doing that than use up my CPU and network resources AND spam me with intrusive ads.

Edit: solid answers to my question. Thanks everyone.

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I've recently done some quick calculations and based on WebAssembly (i.e. near native) mining for the most profitable crypto currencies, you're still almost an order of magnitude below regular ads unless your users leave the page open 24/7

A related tangent that's not quite the same but similar is borrowing localStorage on n x (large exponent) devices and turning it into a virtualized block storage system.

I've heard rumors of systems like this existing but not yet seen any concrete implementations of it.

More efficient to separate the mining aspect and just send a micropayment in a web request.

Brave (the browser) implements of version of this.

While true, using a browser for mining doesn't require the user to have any cryptocurrency, or even know what cryptocurrency is. It also has a similarly opaque cost to them (in the form of electricity).

Brave is getting around that with built-in support for their "Basic Attention Token" which will be rewarded to users just for using their browser.

It will be interesting to see how it works out.

Personally I am just sad that it takes so much energy to maintain the current cryptocurrency networks and they are already too slow for really interesting stuff -- which is why I wouldn't want to add more waste by mining in a browser :).

That sounds like a great target for automation abuse? Rev up a bunch of virtual machines, each with a bit of attention to distribute.

I am sure they've thought of that, but I am not familiar enough with their product to know how they deal with it.

It's been done, but they ran into trouble with New Jersey for a bit.

https://www.eff.org/cases/rubin-v-new-jersey-tidbit

"And the state itself echoed the comments of Judge Furnari, noting in its press release announcing the consent order "we do not believe Tidbit was created for the purpose of invading privacy.""

What about every other ad network in existence? They are specifically designed to invade privacy. Why isn't NJ going after them?

Maybe this is a "whoosh" but (legit) ad networks are specifically designed to sell ads (and thus make the network owners some money); it is hyperbole to claim that each and every one of them has only an ulterior/illegal motive in place of the stated (unpopular one).

This was discussed in 2010 on hacker news and there was a JavaScript pool miner site. I might have even mined a few worthless coins then and forgotten about it.

Here's one of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2566365

By this time, the complexity was already about 1000 or 10k... There was an earlier one I can't find

A team where I worked looked into that as a hack day project - the idea was that you'd mine coins for charity while using our product.

They built it, and was it was feasible, but so underpowered that it wouldn't generate a useful amount of money even across our entire userbase.

I actually did that in my tumblr's theme once, tumblr didn't like it at all lmao.

What would the legal situation be for that? It seems fairly easy to spin as unauthorised use.

In the old days, not anymore, CPU's are too slow to compete with ASIC's for mining.

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