A couple of weeks back there was a headline about a site surreptitiously using visitor's hardware to mine some form of crypto. People were upset, but it made me wonder.. why isn't this a viable business model?

Crypto mining in lieu of advertisers would realign interest between content producer and content consumer - the person who reads your articles begins to be your customer again, instead of the companies advertising to the people reading your content. The only conflict of interest is wanting consumers to spend as much time as possible on your site, but I think that is a big step up compared to the plethora of conflicts imposed by relying on advertising as a business model.

This is of course ignoring the technicalities of working out a crypto where the economics work here. But assuming that would be possible (which is certainly a big assumption), this seems like an interesting concept that could solve the monetization issue facing so many things today in one fell swoop.