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Comment by CaliforniaKarl | Hacker News Reader

I am completely fine with this. The entire question of "How does a web site providing content 'for free' make money?" still seems to be in flux. Yes, people might push for some sort of micropayments thing, and The Guardian is making their method work, but I don't know if that's the exception or the rule. At least, not right now.

Given the choice, I prefer a background miner over ads. Even on a laptop that's running on battery. For one thing, removing the ads (and all the annoying JS they load) should make the page much better to load & navigate, meaning I can go through the content faster. If I don't want to use up my battery, then I'll add the site to my Read Later list, and read it then.

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It wouldn't be so bad if Salon were using 5 or 10% of your CPU, but they are pushing it to 100%. Check out the discussion on r/BATProject[0] which is apart of the Brave browser. Brave is actually fighting the mining situation whilst also trying to help publishers and creators gain money.

Brave are actively blocking ads and background miners, but they offer verified publishers and creators to be donated Basic Attention Tokens (their own cryptocurrency). Users of Brave will be able to gain tokens either by purchasing them or by viewing ads within the browser rather than on the websites. If you're interested, I would recommend you check out their browser which is based on Chromium.[1]

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/7y7tvy/bat_comm... [1] https://brave.com/

For some reason this reminds me of that episode of Black Mirror where you had to pedal a bike or watch ads to get tokens.

I'd be okay with it if choosing to do this on your website wasn't going to obviously incentivize hackers to inject this software maliciously on unsuspecting websites to steal money from unsuspecting users.

The more legit websites do this, the more cryptojacking will wreak havoc on the web.

And for those who say they ask for consent so it's okay, why do the CoinHive people still pay out for versions of the software that don't ask for consent?

choosing to do this on your website wasn't going to obviously incentivize hackers

How does this work? Why would hackers needs this "incentive"?

The less legit it is for a website to mine crypto, the easier it is for adblockers and security to block all such scripts without inconveniencing the user (less tradeoff of usability for security).

But when some sites use it and others doesn't, it makes security complicated and hacks are able to slip through easier.

Also, the more users get used to sites mining on their browsers, the less likely they will be perturbed by and reporting CPU usage spikes (which are used to determine which sites have been hacked by cryptojackers) because they are used to seeing legitimate such spikes from sites they frequent.

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