Where I live we're actually regressing. Went from 30% nuclear to 0%, and now since natural gas is so expensive they're building coal plants.
Ads generate sales that does translate to real world value.
Mining generates distributed consensus on transactions. But why should all computers in the world participate in that? (Obviously, this is best done by specialized hardware)
Also, do you the imagine a future where people make content for the internet inorder to be miners??? Why not just invest in hardware, rather than content for the web.
Also power requirements would be crazy, most devices are battery powered today.. mining is crazy.
Value for the webmaster: the value of the mined coins, obviously.
Is there a certain definition of value you're using that these don't fall under? Why should all people in the world participate in the distributed process of counting out the correct amount of cash in person to each other?
Why doesn't every company just invest directly in finance instead of doing what they do? I don't really have an answer to that, but if user-end mining generated more revenue than ads then website hosts would just switch over to it. Imagining a future where people make content in order to be miners, or indirectly they make content to make money, seems fine, I already support some creators on patreon.
I think the power/cpu requirements for lower end devices could be worked out in time.
Because you have to invest in something that generates value.
Otherwise, it's all just a zero sum game and we might as well go to the casinos..
Coinhive has already been successfully deployed to mine $XMR in browsers. I haven't used it yet, but they claim to get pretty close to native CPU performance also which is pretty incredible.
And what about abuse via advertisers, injection, cross-site, etc?
I feel like the potential for abuse would still be a better tradeoff than the current situation of ads that try to download malware or redirect you to phishing sites.
I just want something where I can put in a few dollars and it goes to sites I visit. (Previous services have resembled this but with notable issues.)
It's way too early to judge the approach based on current implementations, because of flaws in those implementations.
But consider a system where the user is always in control of how much resources the web miner is consuming, via say, specific quotas based on domain, content creator, etc., and that there could be little risk for the miner to hijack those resources.
This is a technical problem that can be easily solved in future revisions.
That said, I'm not sure if mining is the right approach, simply because the proof of work is completely arbitrary for some currencies (e.g. Bitcoin) and has no real value.
With content creators it's clear: they provide the value, the content consumers want, and set the cost accordingly, and the consumer simply decides to pay for it. It's simple, and no client side mining would be required.
Mining is only necessary to lower the barrier of entry for the consumer, since they wouldn't need to have a digital wallet with existing funds. But in the near future owning a digital wallet will be just as common, if not more, as having a social media account, so this wouldn't be necessary for the long term.
Exactly.
> Mining is only necessary to lower the barrier of entry for the consumer,
Even now there is a barrier of entry, which is the processing costs. The goal is to lower them, not to force burning the more hydrocarbons for every transaction.