Hacker News Reader

Comment by sumitgt | Hacker News Reader

Actually, why is this not a potential legitimate business model?

I let you stream content for free and you let me mine cryto-coins with your spare CPU cycles while you watch. Isn't that better for people who don't like all the tracking by ads?

View on HN

It only really makes sense with browser-level cpu scheduling. Otherwise there's no real way to throttle the amount of cpu these bitcoin miners take from you.

Without that, I think people are unlikely to be sympathetic and they'll be snagged by ad blockers rapidly: consent is the cornerstone of products people like.

It's possible to throttle. Perform n hashes, wait 100ms, repeat.

Certainly it's possible for the script author to throttle. Not so much for the web site visitor.

I hope it's just a matter of time before browsers start to throttle sites...

Or maybe search rankings will be affected by CPU usage, and bandwidth.

Chrome has added throttling for inactive tabs. The problem is this is an active tab open for long stretches of time doing a somewhat cpu intensive task, so throttling isn't an option. I also doubt that be too adversely affected by slipping down the search rankings in this case.

Bandwidth and loads time already do play a part in search rankings, at least with Google.

Which is a lot easier toeasure than long running CPU usage unfortunately (at least not without privacy concerns - e.g. getting real world data from users)

adblock-nocoin-list

https://github.com/hoshsadiq/adblock-nocoin-list/

This is great! Thanks!

Why would they block miner.pr0gramm.com, which is only used in one specific place (the pr0gramm site itself) where you need to explicitly press a start button to mine?

"More than $BIGNUM entries? These guys know what they're doing!"

My point is that it's clear that you mine when you use their miner. You get premium points on the website as a reward. How is that shady? I think it's a perfect use case of where a web miner makes sense as an alternative monetization method.

> why is this not a potential legitimate business model?

I was thinking the same thing the other day when I first heard about it. One of the main issues with existing subscription models is that some people only want to consume a small fraction of what is available from a service provider (news, music, video etc) yet have to pay a not-insignificant fee for access to everything. A good example would be the latest Star Trek series only being available in the US via CBS All Access (thankful that I'm in a country where it'll be available on Netflix).

If I could lease out my CPU for a real-time exchange of services, that'd suit me just fine. I already have accounts with an energy provider and ISP, so it's one fewer monetary relationship I need to worry about.

You could be asked on a per view basis, so by default all sites are blocked and need to ask for the exchange to be approved. You could also white-list trusted sites, or for a set period approve all requests not unlike a software firewall e.g. Little Snitch paired with an ad-blocker.

This is something the W3C should standardise at the browser level so it's not inefficient and works across different browsers effectively. It could potentially save journalism and other business models that don't jive well with existing subscription/payment structures.

Running this at full speed will turn on your fan on and having this running could damage or limit the life of your computer.

It's like driving for uber where in the end you pay more for repairs than you would in salary.

At the end of my post I suggested it be standardised at the browser level for this purpose. Just because the implementation sucks now doesn't mean it has to always suck.

It is a non scalable model. The more people who use this the greater the rating for mining. Currently it takes 5.5 billion hashes to meet the min payment for coinhive. At full power you might get 30h/s per person on a desktop or 15h/s on a phone. If you had 10000 mobile visitors who came everyday and stayed 1 minute it would take 10000 days to get min payout: 1/2 a monero coin so about 40/50 dollars. I don't see how this will replace advertising where one affilate sale could replace this income.

These aren't free streaming services, and there was no disclosure, let alone consent, about the mining.

edit: And CBS most likely never ordained the mining to begin with.

Mining in Javascript will get you less than the infrastructure costs to provide the videos, let alone replacing ad revenue.

Not if it's free and distributed worldwide. 99% of people don't even know what these coins are, regardless of what happens in the background when a computer requests content on a server.

I see it alongside ads.

No matter how many browsers are working on it?

"We lose money on every sale, but we make it up in volume!"

If were talking about new monitisation schemes, can we not entertain the thought of using newer technologies better suited to streaming at scale? I'm thinking of IPFS in particular, but there are probably other solutions as well.

Such as WebRTC.

What about a clever webgl shader to leverage the GPU?

Or a browser that offers a first-class mining API. Then we'll see every device come with a specialized mining chip. As long as you meet the required number of hashes you get the add-free experience.

Sounds like an abomination.

It might force devs to optimize code more, since there will never be any more spare cycles muhahaha

Whose to say it's spare cycles? How does the site know I'm not watching something in a tiny window while doing work?

Or watching full-screen while a script does the work.

It makes sense while the coins have value; I wonder what value they would retain if every website started doing this.

Also, I question whether it's a sensible use of electricity on the whole.

I hate it being done without informed consent. It's also a huge waste of electricity. On the plus side it could lead to micropayment funded instead of ad-funded sites.

> I hate it being done without informed consent.

I'm more worried about the precedent, "informed consent" can always be buried deep in a T&C document.

"consent" can perhaps be buried, but I doubt it would be found to be informed.

You know what's even better than that?

Downloading the 1080p torrent off TPB.

Which coin is worth mining on a CPU at all?

Monero? Existing botnets earn $50,000/day mining on people's computers at night while finding ways to spread to additional ones.

A single computer earns pennies, a couple hundred thousand earn way more.

A customer base of hundreds thousands doing streaming will cost you way more than $50k/day.

It doesn't have to completely cover the costs, only offset it some and be used in conjunction with other income generation methods.

Personally, I don't mind it so long as it is both fully disclosed and the ramifications fully explained - both in an accessible manner to a layperson. So long as they do that, I'm okay with it. I'm more okay with it if they give the user a simple means to opt out in a meaningful fashion.

Now, chances are exactly none of those conditions will be met in the real world. But, in principle, I am okay with it.

Unless you just package it and let youtube do the actual streaming. Imagine creating "cat-videos.com" and embedding all the youtube videos into the site but providing a better UI for browsing them.

But you'd get both ads and mining. The point of mining was to get rid of ads!

It would be fun if AES-NI support was added to JavaScript engines, though it would need a standard.

As far as I'm aware, AES calculations aren't a component of any cryptocurrency.

Yes, Monero uses the CryptoNote PoW algorithm which uses AES.

A single computer rarely even earns pennies.

You pay us in electricity draw we didn't tell you about is a good business model?

Do people complain about the electricity draw when they're hosting a bunch of bloated flash?

Yes. That's why iOS doesn't have flash.

It is, but the difference here is that the contracted developer added it to mine coins for themselves.

That seems likely to me too, but did the article say that? Or is there another source?

In the article:

> "Upon reviewing our products and code, the HTML comments shown in the screenshot that are referencing newrelic were not injected by New Relic's agents. It appears they were added to the website by its developers."

> [Coin Hive] did confirm to us, however, that the email address used to set up the account was a personal one, and was not an official CBS email address, further suggesting malicious activity.

Yeah, it was obvious it was never NewRelic. But it is not obvious if it was a contractor, and employee, or someone who gained access through other means.

Given the difficulty of mining any worthwhile cryptocurrency these days (even using GPU farms instead of a web browser running on a tablet or underpowered laptop) I doubt it'd generate enough revenue to make up for the loss of ads or other micropayment options.

Furthermore you can't even fix the price of the payment since you're at the mercy of the hash difficulty and the cryptocurrency value. Doesn't seem like a very good business model to me.

> spare CPU cycles

"Spare CPU cycles" were only a thing back in the 90's, when CPUs ran at a fixed frequency, and it didn't make much difference whether it was running useful code or waiting in the idle loop. Nowadays, the frequency and voltage vary depending on whether the CPU is being used or not, so instead of "spare cycles" doing nothing the CPU powers itself down.

the only in-browser miner I've seen sucked up CPU whether it was spare or not.

Because if this becomes mainstream, people will come to know what crypto currency and mining is and wonder why arent they mining it themselves (more effectively so using native clients instead of shitty js miners) instead of giving them to others in exchange for content they were getting anyway with adblock.

Greed basically.

Doing it on my laptop probably means I won't even finish the episode before I run out of batteries.

There needs to be consent on both sides, for it to enter the realm of legitimacy.

So, you cut my phone’s battery runtime to nothing, cost me 10 to 100x more than you get yourself in electricity (German electricity prices are north of 0.40$ per kWh), and with a few dozen tabs my system crashes?

No thanks.

It might be okay if it was clearly explained and legit.

It is a business model. VPN service windscribe offers free Pro service (apparently) if you let it mine certain threshold of coins on your browser.

Well at the moment, likely because people aren't being told about it...

iphones are a much better vector.

Not all computer are built to do heavy computing. My poor Mac mini would probably melt after a few minutes of mining.

Interesting, you should apply to YC 2018!

On a similar note, I wonder how much money the Chinese government could make if they used the method they used to DDoS Github [0], but instead to load crypto-coin mining JavaScript onto every Baidu user's computer?

Then again, that seems like one of the fastest ways to make the average citizen actually angry at the Great Firewall.

[0]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/massi...

The Chinese government is working hard to decrease pollution, not add additional stress on the power grid. Incentives change when you're the one responsible for all the externalities.

The GFW works both ways. That attack injected code into Chinese browsers viewing sites outside the GFW, but it could just as easily inject code into browsers outside the GFW viewing Chinese sites...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com