And the cost to the society is few cents of electricity minus fraction of a cent the site gets, paid in fuel being wasted on producing that electricity.
Crypto mining is a disaster. If I were an evil mastermind who wanted to deepen the energy and climate problems of the world, cryptocurrencies is what I would push for.
Or put differently, cryptocurrencies are trying to replace a system that's O(log n) with respect to energy with a system that's O(n^2), for questionable and mostly imaginary benefit of trustless payments.
Advertising today is mostly a zero-sum game, where all the effort you put into it goes to offset the equivalent effort your competitor puts into it. Thus it forms a feedback loop of ever increasing waste.
Still, this topic is not relevant to discussion about merits of cryptocurrencies.
You mean just like ads do? Of course, in a perfect world we wouldn't have either, but I just don't see clear distinction between mining in browser or ads or other useless/annoying things (from the user perspective).
One of those disincentivizes waste (howewer weakly). The other incentivizes it.
> playing computer games, watching mindless YouTube videos, scrolling Facebook, leaving devices on when not used, lighting places 24/7 where nobody goes at night anyway etc.?
We do. But all those examples are the case where energy use gives us something (fun, convenience) and where the waste is bounded (there're only so many devices I can leave powered, and also I have to pay for the power they use). Crypto mining literally pays you for wasting power, so the more electricity you can burn, the more money you get. And the more people join in, the more you have to burn to keep up. So there's almost no ceiling to how much personally you get to waste, and a strong incentive to waste as much as you can.
And what's all of that for? To replace a system that works fine and does not have a greed-powered feedback loop of waste? That's just dumb.
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[0] - Currently. Hopefully they'll always stay that way, but there's an off chance this becomes so popular that all new computers will come equipped with additional hardware and drivers to mine crypto for micropayments.
Well, you (or somebody else) still has to pay for power consumption used for mining, so it just converts money you pay for energy bill to micropayments (though in very unfavorable rate as of yet). Don't get me wrong, I don't advocate such shady behavior in any way, just wanted to point out that this "wasted power" point is a bit of a stretch.
For a regular computer plugged-in to a real electricity network, maybe. For a person on battery, or trying to charge their device before going out, or on a limited power supply (e.g. small home battery supplied by solar panel, or a car charger), it's more than that.
If this becomes mainstream the overall difficulty of the cryptocurrency they're mining will raise making it less rewarding.
In other words you have a "micropayment" method where you can't really fix the price unless you're willing to force the user to mine for a certain amount of time before they can access the content. All I see is a good way to waste energy.
Mining from a random browser will almost certainly never be cost effective for the user, you're better off buying or renting dedicated hardware, mine on it and use the reward to pay for microtransactions.
The Coinhive Monero miner is about 65% as fast as a native miner would be, at least in Browsers that support WASM.
Disclaimer: I wrote the Coinhive Monero miner.
Maybe Intel will throw it on their chips as a processor extension.
At US electricity prices.
At German electricity prices of 0.40$ per kWh, this is costing you a magnitude more than the site even gets.
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-case-for-micropayments/
This article by Jakob Nielsen already called for them 20 years ago and if you read it today, it doesn't look like we moved a bit considering ads on websites.
The payment overhead with traditional payment options is just to big. Paypal has 30 cents per transactions IIRC? Way too much if you just want to proces a few cents or even a fraction of a cent. Systems like Flattr or Kachingle solve this in another interesting way but it's still not ideal.
Crypto currencies would solve nicely this problem but of course, there needs to be easier ways of getting them and paying with them. I have no doubts that the latter will come quickly (see also the new Payment Request API). The former, we'll have to see. But I'm optimistic and would be surprised if we didn't have that within 5 years.
A crypto currency backed by a real world currency would of course be best as you don't have an issue with volatility but you have to live with some volatility anyway, if you don't restrict yourself from buying from places that use the same currency as you.
Anonymity is obviously not a problem for most people as you can see by all those people that use Paypal and credit cards. For those people even the level of pseudonymity that Bitcoin offers would actually be an improvement.
Replaces? Like they'll ever give those up...