Salon.com wants to fight ad-blockers by using your PC to mine cryptocurrency

The idea of using browser cycles to mine cryptocurrency is nothing new. Another recent effort: https://oysterprotocol.com/ .

The problem is that savvy users will install additional plugins to block these Javascript programs from running, the same way that they use Adblock. Unsavvy users will just have a shorter battery life.

Another effort in this space is Brave, and Basic Attention Tokens (BAT). Instead of expending browser resources to mine, the idea is that people start using a special browser (Brave) that dispenses BATs to the websites you dwell the most on / get the most value out of. Then presumably the site that receives the BAT could exchange them for USD.

Hey Guys,

I am the new CMO of www.Oysterprotocol.com, I would love to help answer your technical questions with our Founder

https://medium.com/oysterprotocol/cmo-hire-infrastrucure-and...

Chris Garner

Salon is completely missing the point of adblockers. Half the reason I install them to begin with is so that my computer stops pegging the CPU, spinning up the fans and killing my battery life just to view a goddamn text file. Mining cryptocurrency as I browse doesn't fix that in the slightest. They're solving a problem for them, not for me, so I'll pass.

Well there another addition to my hosts file. Being redirected to 0.0.0.0.