Could cryptocurrency mining kill online advertising?
linkedin.com
linkedin.com
I'm surprised I even have to spell this out for people, but here goes:
Mining stops the double spend problem just like market makers solve the liquidity problem: A little bit is great, but at scale it's divorced from the public good it provides. We don't need the amount of mining that is going on in Bitcoin right now. It's just wasted cycles because of the economics of the damn thing.
What fundamental good does spreading any PoW to millions or billions of devices accomplish? Nothing. That is why cryptocurrency mining will never take over advertising.
What should take over advertising (if anything) is micropayments built into the browser. Maybe with some sort of probabilistic or web-of-trust mechanism on top to prevent the bookkeeping burden from overtaking the payment amount.
The problem with advertising is that it rots peoples minds and makes certain classes of goods compete on brand instead of competing on quality.
I think a lot of people miss that mining is zero sum when over the threshold that the network needs.
For example if mining hardware costs dropped by one half, people catch up and mine with twice as much computing power, the network increases the difficulty of mining by two, and the same amount of bitcoin is distributed and secured as was before the hardware innovation. You aren't mining more 'efficiently' with advances in computing power at the large scale.
Bitcoins are the consistently valuable and liquid coin, therefore it can make sense to serve bitcoin mining js.
Why? Because each desktop CPU would only yield 20-30 megahashes per second, less if you don't want to slow the user's computer to a crawl. A server would need to manage millions of clients just to match a single ASIC miner which has efficiency rated in terahashes. And that amount of hash power would only return about 30 dollars in bitcoin on a good day.
This is why all javascript miners target Monero and the latter was often criticised for having a CPU-friendly PoW because this is just asking for botnets to form.
As it is javascript is the number one reason for shit battery life, I don't want to make that even worse than the days of flash which its rapidly already become today.
Faustian bargains like that aren't a great definition of progress.
Fundamentally the issue here is energy consumption while on battery. Without a way to say: a site can use N% of battery and then hard cap the usage down to a trickle and alerting the site that the user has limited energy resources available, I think this is a non starter.
Similar to when you are on LTE you don't want to use up limited bandwidth for say 4k video and want to say: you know what, I'll deal with this later and not go over my monthly allocation, the same applies here.
Is that view that unreasonable?
Well, if the owners of those devices control the mining they're doing, then it secures the network by preventing a 51% attack from any single miner with enough power. But in this case, only the website operator benefits by not having to pay for electricity.
0. This starves the advertising industry, which has insatiable apatite for private information, and questionable practices of obtaining it.
1. Payment is done using only CPU power and you electric bill which are private, and the process itself could be made secure and efficient by incorporating it into browsers.
2. Sites no longer have to trick you or your ad blocker into watching something you don't want to watch (or clicking on it). Instead, they are motivated to keep you on their site longer. It's not perfect, and trickery still might be involved, but it still seems like a better motivation. Heck, some sites might even try to keep you by producing solid content.
3. Journalists get an income source without any political strings attached, they don't have to worry about writing something bad about some major advertiser.
However, I'm really not sure about the economics of all of this. How many CPU cycles does it take to replace a single ad?
Plus, wasting all of those CPU cycles on mining produces nothing of actual value. I'd much rather auction off some of my CPU time to the highest bidder or contribute it to some worthy cause.
Not really private... my electric meter broadcasts my power consumption in plain text on the 900MHz ISM band every minute... I used this program to read the meters of all my neighbors: https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr ... You probably also can buy the data from the power companies...
As far as passing money between people goes, it's more private than giving someone cash in a back alley.
Sure it's less efficient and the tasks need to be broken down into much smaller chunks, but at least this way your spare CPU power could be auctioned off to some more useful purpose. What if instead of an ad space, you're running protein folding simulations, or rendering frames for a small art studio's film project? I'd gladly donate my spare CPU cycles for those kinds of projects on purpose. I think there's a market for this kind of thing, and I'd like to see more experimentation.
Last I counted, my estimate on profitability was 0.006 cents / computer / minute.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/62m5mu/eli5_why_can...
To be clear, literally mining Bitcoin without specialized equipment is so wildly unprofitable to be an idiotic business model and that's obvious after five minutes of Googling.
There's also the bit about stability, you might have a business model that's profitable one month or worthless the next. Who wants that risk?
More likely, this is just something sites start doing on top of advertising.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=javascript%20miner&sort=byPopu...
There's this great blurb:
We're a bit saddened to see that some of our customers integrate Coinhive into their pages without disclosing to their users what's going on, let alone asking for their permission. We believe there's so much more potential for our solution, but we have to be respectful to our end users.
https://coinhive.com/blog/status-report
It'd be awesome if someone did a comprehensive breakdown. If you scale this up to remove ads from 10% of the net or 30%, does it stay valuable with that mining power added to a single coin? Or does this business model require the continued pump and dump of worthless coins? What kind of energy and workload is this putting on user machines (in many cases without permission)?
If I run across a site that is mining without notice and permission, I'll never visit again, as best as I can. I don't want to support that. Hosting websites is relatively cheap, if companies weren't writing such bloated software, their costs would be much lower. Fix that first without adding more junk to the tech community, please.
According to coinwarz you can make $5.1 for 24 hours of mining on CPU/GPU, but realistically (for an average visitor) probably closer to $1/24hrs. If we take Reddit, which has 13 minutes average visit, probably between 5M and 50M daily visits.
That's $45K - $451K daily revenue.
That's probably more than their ad revenue.
1. Sell compute when people aren't using their machines and split the spoils (not actually profitable for people who pay their own electric bills, but you don't have to say that)
2. Just create malware miners that run all the time.
Currently it will take you two years of one the newer computers running constantly to even meet half of the min payout on coinhive.
The more people the greater the difficulity. Lose-lose for everyone.
Ads are great. The current trend against them is shortsighted. Without ads we would be paying for content in walled gardens with less share-ability. Content would he hoarded and tokenized as opposited to widely shared.
Out of the 60 top thread would you micropay to read them all? No but someone does for each one and writes a summary in the comments. Lose-lose because the site gets less money/traffic the readers rely on secondhand information and no one is better off aside from the micropayment provider who takes a cut.
If people complain they'll just do it very slowly.
Hash(nonce + Hash(chain[including with new transactions])) < value.
So in some sense you need the chain but you can pass Hash(chain) to a client and let that just increase nonce and hash it.
Without synchronisation the found block might be for a stale chain but if you're using someone else's power you don't care, and the nature of distribution here means it's likely to be fresh anyway in the unlikely chance something is found.
Hash(nonce + 2^256 * Hash(chain[including with new transactions])) < value
Still an oversimplification, of course.
These people need to care for pigs. Or better yet, go homeless and dig for peach pits in a dumpster.
They won't ever learn.