Making a case for JavaScript, in-browser Mining
berk.es
berk.es
In any case, you're effectively paying for the mining on your power bill. So nevermind that this approach disadvantages users who pay higher rates for electricity or have older, less-power-efficient computers.
It is possible to detect mobile and disable it completely, but for now, because it's mostly demo material, I'll leave it enabled for mobile too. In a real-world scenario you'd probably show a message or explain why a mobile user cannot use it. That would certainly give you credits.
* javascript miners operate at a fraction of the efficiency of native miners (I don't have exact numbers, but I vaguely remember somewhere between 1/2 to 2/3)
* "professional" (ie. non-javascript) miners use high end CPUs, whereas the typical user might be on a i3 or ARM device. this matters because monero mining gets a significant performance boost from a bigger cache.
* "professional" mining pools have fees of ~1%. coinhive has a fee of 30%.
* mining is competitive market, where profit margins are low.
I actually didn't know that coinhive's fee was that high. that alone means $3 of every $10 is "lost" as transaction fees.
None of these things leads to the conclusion that there isn't an arrangement whereby a website visitor can dedicated x seconds to mining and end up paying a reasonable amount in incremental electricity costs for doing so while providing a third-party with a sufficient financial benefit to compensate for the cost of the content consumed/service provided.
This barely makes sense today, where are your hard numbers showing how this will work if we try to fund journalism by throwing a coinhive script onto nytimes.com?
Tech people love these sorts of things, because it allows us to pretend we've solved a tough social problem (how do we pay for journalism) with a neat cryptographic hashing algorithm, when in reality we've just invented a horribly inefficient way to add hidden micro-transactions to our end user's power bills.
But the article is talking about the idea of a cryptocurrency which is mined in the browser as a potential area of exploration for a way to allow a publisher to directly monetize their users electrical resources in return for products or services.
Most of these comments are looking only through the lens of what exists today and assuming that the only implementation is a direct you-mine-coin-you-pay-with-your-coin-who's-value-to-USD-fluctuates. There is no reason a system would need to do that.
It would be just as feasible for a publisher to grant access to the service based on the time the miner is running above some speed threshold not its total cumulative speed, even if the cumulative speed is what is generating value for the publisher. The threshold becomes the fixed price, and fixed prices across customers who provide variable levels of value to a company are common.
best case scenario (xeon): you pay a 15% fee to transfer your electricity costs the site owner
worser case scenario (atom): you pay a 64% fee to transfer your electricity costs the site owner
More useful would be a 'pay by letting us consume some fixed amount of electricity by doing some mining with your browser'. The difference between what you paid for electricity and what the company is providing you in products/services determines your cash cost, and is different for every person.
That's all POW cryptos are anyway, buying electricity and turning it into a coin that then sells for cash. The worst case would be if you had to pay in cash because its so slow, so then it became just paying with the coin directly, so why not go back further and pay with the electricity directly and let the publisher deal with mining and coins and such?
I agree, up to an extent, that mining as whole, has a problem to overcome. But, so far, there is no way to have a stake other than "electricity". And you need that stake (in the Proof Of Work) to solve the Byzantine Fault Tolerance.
Proof of stake, or even Proof of RAM (I'm just making that up here), Proof of Space are alternatives, some are actively being developed. Proof of Stake, might, potentially, solve this whole "energy wasting" thing.
But the fundamental question is: "Is it a waste of energy"? Is the burning of energy to secure a decentralized, autonomous, permissionless monetary system a "waste"? Maybe. but in that case there are far more obvious cases of "wasting" energy.
This just smacks of convenience for the implementers and as for the user, it exchanges a straightforward system for a murky deal.
When you watch ads and get data-mined do your really now how much value you pay? I don't think so, it's safe to safe that all of us have no clue about the price we indirectly pay for services we on internet, most of it is just free in appearance.
>How much 'currency' will be mined? Will it be proportional to the goods/services I get to use in exchange? How long will the process take? What if my system fails midway during 'payment'?
The norms are not established yet since it's a totally new way to monetize content on internet however how much you will pay will probably be determined in hashes. Here an example with a new blockchain (Nimiq) of a micropayment you could do: http://coinmiq.com/mine/eyJ3YWxsZXQiOiJOUTI3IFJDNUIgOUU1QSBT...
>This just smacks of convenience for the implementers and as for the user, it exchanges a straightforward system for a murky deal.
I disagree, in my opinion it opens an entire new way to do micropayments on the web.
You call the current ad-funded 'you get the service free but we secretly monetize everything about you' a straight-forward system?
This seems way more direct to me. Want to consume content? Run code in your browser while you do so.
I would honestly prefer more services and content creators asking for reasonable payments and more integration of multiple, seamless, international payment options into sites and services. Currently a major reason I don't pay for some services I otherwise would is because the payment process is very clunky or downright broken.
Ah, gotcha. TBF, most of the discussion around this is about replacing ad-funded models with browser-based mining, not replacing direct payments.
> I don't pay for some services I otherwise would is because the payment process is very clunky or downright broken.
This is a great reason to look harder at in-browser mining.
Electrical utilities have far lower payment processing costs than SAAS payment providers like Stripe. They also provide a way of aggregating many microtransactions in a way that credit-card networks actively try to prevent.
Especially in the third world, people often don't have credit cards or bank accounts. When they do, transaction costs make microtransactions inefficient.
But to donate directly, you'd need a common payment service. That means registering (password and two-factor), then either transferring money to your account or authorizing it to draw from your bank account, and finally sending the payment, probably revealing a fair few bit of information about yourself to a website you may like but not necessarily trust. And every step of that process can be hacked, or have connection problems, or you may be on a different computer and need to re-login, and so on.
Paying with electricity lets you skip all that, and HN should be well aware that convenience is worth a lot of money.
In addition to that, with money you must choose how much to donate, and that is a burden on its own. (Does this blogger deserve one buck, or two? I gave two to that article last week, and this dude is almost as good, but I've decided my weekly budget is X €, and I'm almost over it, etc. etc.)
With a JS miner, you pay exactly as long as you keep the tab open, which is a pretty good proxy for how much the page is personally valuable to you.
I don’t think it is. People open links in new tabs for later, and “later” can be quite a while.
In e.g. Chrome timer events in such a tab are fired only once per second.
And its definitely not true that browsers can actively manage the resources available to inactive tabs, right?
Just because the current set of options doesn't respect these, that is not a reason to discard the idea entirely.
There are services such as flattr and patreon that tries to fix this. It is not perfect and the horrendous javascript-infested pages today and click-bait focus doesn't exactly encourage donation.
This is a huge assumption that you are making no attempt to back up.
Without specifying what currency is being mined or the rate of earning it per kw/h you have no way of determining the relative value of those two things.
Paul Graham might disagree;
"The two most important things to understand about startup investing, as a business, are (1) that effectively all the returns are concentrated in a few big winners, and (2) that the best ideas look initially like bad ideas." (emphasis mine) [From http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html]
Stealth is not necessarily a sign something is bad; it might just be hard to persuade people that it's good, and that's a reason to be stealthy.
"It also reminds you that the vast majority of ideas that seem bad are bad."
The idea of running up every web browsing computer to 100% CPU, costing them tens of dollars in electricity while giving you a few cents of cryptocurrency, seems bad and is bad.
https://www.wired.com/story/bitcoin-mining-guzzles-energyand...
I guess you could complain about the usefulness of mining.
Well, people do a bunch of useless stuff that has magnitudes bigger carbon footprint than mining.
Let's not optimize things that are insignificant.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/bitcoins-insane-...
Can it be compared with other Internet services? How much electricity does Facebook consume, for example? What about internet advertisements?
Or 3,5 times what Amazon US-East cluster consumes: https://datacenterfrontier.com/amazon-approaches-1-gigawatt-...
If websites begin to crowdsource mining on their visitors' PCs using JavaScript, the energy consumption will be even higher.
32tWh/yr means roughly 3,6GW, which is output of 1-2 average nuclear power plants.
If we're going to soon need dozens of nuclear reactors to power cryptocurrencies, that's worth discussing at least. You can't brush it away as something insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
Let's say a reactor works for 10 years.
That would give $32,760 billion in trade, and reactor cost would be 0.833% of that.
Not a big fee if you ask me.
Of course, if cryptocurrencies would scale so they become significant between other trades, we can't just built thousands of nuclear reactors. This is where proof of stake will come into play.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out
Reactors are being built primarily for heating and cooling, and eventually vehicle charging.
Let's optimize the real stuff, not some trivialities (like the Christmas lights in the USA pointed out as a reply).
There's 24/7 AC in USA and China in the masses. There's Brazilian and Argentinian agriculture removing rainforests to grow food for the USA or EU that grows cattle. (EU takes unbelievable amounts of rainforest grain/legumes to feed its livestock, an absolute travesty and hipocrisy)
The footprint of these developments is insanely large, yet somehow coin mining is an issue.
We could then jump to optimize the Internet infrastructure too, despite being 1-2% of CO2 equivalent footprint.
Yes, I understand coin mining seems a bit useless but I'm pretty sure heating and cooling is wasted in magnitudes more amounts, being applied in badly designed buildings, or cooling the streets of Las Vegas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_aviati...
2) Some of those cryptocurrencies have different proof of work algorithms
3) Some of those are designed specifically for browser-based mining and have nothing to do with Bitcoin's ASIC-optimized POW
https://github.com/trey-jones/xmrwasp#a-word-about-responsib...
So I guess I'm clearly in favor of it. In general I would prefer opt-in mining to advertising. If you are interested in why, I'll be happy to discuss. I think my thoughts are laid out in the README.
I also made a simple demo page here:
It won't mine unless you ask it to. The point of the demo is to check out what impact various degrees of mining have on your other activities. The default is VERY low with a single thread and 50% throttle.
I'm not sure if this is a polarizing topic, or if I'm not thinking clearly about it because I've gotten on the boat, drunk the kool-aid, or whatever.
If websites took small payments in a cryptocurrency where mining the cryptocurrency took about the same amount of time as it takes to consume the content, then "printing" money is available to almost anyone with a decent device. It's also a good way to set a price for content; instead of some bozo thinking that his/her article is worth $3 or $15.
I think that cryptocurrency, as a technology, still has far to go before it can support this kind of commerce. This is in terms of technological improvement, scalability, and a design that takes into account how economics works on a large scale.
Also why is everyone talking about Bitcoin in this thread? No one is trying to mine Bitcoin in the browser. There are other cryptocurrencies than Bitcoin. Some of those are designed to run in the browser specifically to address the concern with using a POW system in an intentionally resource-constrained environment.
There is a GPU miner for Monero (actually, there is a GPU miner for everything) which turns in-browser mining into not that profitable idea.
https://getmonero.org/2018/02/11/PoW-change-and-key-reuse.ht...
It seems they have opted to prefer browser miners and botnets over centralization caused by dedicated hardware (ASICs).
Profitibility in the traditional sense factors in electricity, but when you're using someone else's electricity, that's not a consideration. If you have enough users, the return is quite reasonable for the site owner.
Brave also controls what kind of advertisements you can see and prevents things like auto playing videos and full screen ads from cropping up.
It also allows you to apportion micro payments to content producers.
Won’t weigh in on whether this makes brave groundbreaking or not, but this is at least part of what it does that makes it unique.
It also has this whole interface it exposes to advertisers and content owners I don’t fully understand.
I know the author is doing opt-in mining but that’s obviously going to be as popular as opt-in ad tracking vs automatic. The model will be pages just serve up the in browser mining without asking.
I explicitly made a case for opt-in. How is that "theft"?
And whether or not that is popular is besides the case. If it is impopular, it still is not "theft", is it?