Google Bans Crypto-Currency Mining Extensions from Chrome Store
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Now that I see they are removing cryptocurrency miners it all makes sense. I use SHA1 sum to make GUID of article if it is not present or if it is too long, so that must have triggered their system to mark my RSS reader as crypto miner.
"Just don't use the platform" is becoming more expensive and less practical for consumers every passing day. The same economies of scale that allow individual Internet companies to effectively dominate markets also confer the power to decide who has access and how, even if there's essentially only one game in town. Anti-trust regulation may experience some interesting evolution these next few years.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/cloudflares-ceo-...
It seems pretty rich for a company whose business model revolves around building traps for user data and then using to that data to drive mostly unwanted targeted advertising. Of the three choices:
1. paid services, 2. privacy violation + ads or 3. service uses X% of my CPU,
I'd choose 3 every time. The killer app of cryptocurrencies is monetizing PoW. Someone is going to build the new doubleclick on that and displace google.
It seems that many of these mining extensions are obvious scams anyway, an other commenter in this thread gave this as an example: https://getcryptotab.com/en/
It's an obvious pyramid scheme. Even if you wanted to mine Monero in your web browser (not exactly the most efficient way I'd wager) why would you share the benefits with some random third party instead of directly joining an open pool?
If you want a laugh I suggest looking at their calculator that (with the default values) tells you that you're going to win $40k if you manage to enroll 10 million people underneath you. Good luck!
This particular extension is the first result when you search "bitcoin" in the Chrome Web Store, with close to 20k ratings (all absolutely genuine I'm sure).
Websites that actually use mining as an alternative to ads don't use extensions in my experience, they simply load a Javascript/wasm miner à la coinhive.
I’d be cool with having a site mine at 35% cpu for the few minutes while I use their site in exchange for no ads and no tracking.
I think this is likely the only way that we can replace the Google/Facebook ad-driven business model that runs the consumer Internet.
These cryptocurrency extensions like the one I linked in my previous post are not used to monetize websites, rather they're just a somewhat regular crypto miner shipped as a browser add-on. You don't use it to pay for browsing pages, you use it directly to mine the currency and earn money. It's probably significantly less efficient than a stand-alone miner but it's easier to distribute that way, especially if your goal is to scam people into integrating your pyramid scheme.
I really don't want the world to devolve into a future where armies of ignored pre-teens with ipads are rapidly accelerating global warming, just so that they can watch clickbait videos and share content in $social_network_vNext, on sites sponsored by "monitising PoW".
What I think the crypto that sticks will basically be the unit of exchange where people are able to swap cpu, disk, memory without intermediaries. So it’s not speculation, but a real market for unused resources.
In the olden days phone numbers (900-SEXX) could charge you through the phone bill. It was convenient but really high transaction fees. If you could do this with electricity without having a big transaction that would be cool.
Also environmentally friendly as places with high power costs (coal, oil) could easily switch to lower cost resources (hydro, nuke) with renewables.
---
Good day to you!
Here is XXX, I am a business manager at Getcryptotab.com - is a bitcoin mining affiliate platform. And we're looking for publishers who are ready to help us to promote this project in exchange for high rates for you ;)
How it works - a user installs google chrome script and mines bitcoins, invites new users by a referral link and multiplies his earnings.
And we're looking for ad placements of a fixed banner with a direct link to our project.
We're ready to discuss the rates which will satisfy you and other different options for our convenient and profitable cooperation.
So please, add me on Skype and let's discuss.
Looking forward to hearing back from you and wish you have a great weekend!
-- Regards,
XXX Business Manager
Anyone using winky face in a cold email like that should be slapped.
When I receive a winky face in an email, I'm thinking, "I need an adult!"
As they say, this is why we can't have good things, because someone will be unscrupulous and will take advantage of social norms.
I wonder if they will leave the door open for sites which "recoup" their costs/pay the bills via mining, if they are upfront about it.
From the statement, seems they might not, given "The company will however continue to permit extensions designed for blockchain-related purposes that do not involving _mining_ in the web store. " and "Google’s decision reverses its policy so far of allowing crypto-currency mining extensions in its Web Store so long as that was the extension’s sole purpose and users were adequately informed of the extension’s purpose."
So mining of any kind appears to be out. So much for an alternative to other micropayments systems.
And where extensions were really just mining cryptocurrency, they were often clearly made to be deployed on systems the user wasn't authorized to use that way. For example, from the description of one Monero miner extension:
> The extension is anonymous and untraceable [ghost emoji] and you can use it on any amount of computers [personal computer emoji] The more processing power, the more money you get. Install the extension at home/work/school and win Bitcoins [money bag emoji]"
-- https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bitcoin-monero-min...
Note that extensions that secretly mined cryptocurrency in the background were already banned from the Chrome store. The change here is that now Google's no longer going to try to discriminate between extensions that secretly mine cryptocurrency in the background from extensions that fully disclose that behavior. (Presumably because it's easier to automate enforcement of the rules this way.)
One of the many reasons this behaviour is so scummy is that for popular cryptocurrencies, one very quickly reaches the point where £1 of electricity spend CPU mining produces much less than £1 of "currency". Economically, it only makes sense if you're exploiting many unaware users.
But precisely why it’s less lucrative is why it’s a threat. Remember when Napster came out and the argument was “they’ll never make as much money as the record industry?”
For new entrants making an order of magnitude less is perfectly fine because they are a new market. Why would they care if google loses $1B in ad revenue if they make $100M. Especially since you don’t really need a market maker like Google matching ad buyers to content makers, the $100M can go directly to content creators running sites.
The payout for Adsense is super low for display. They don’t reveal the payout ratio for clicks, but I expect it’s 10-30%.
So for comparison for $1B in current AdSense payout to content sites, content creators only get $100-300M based on clicks.
If you replaced this with crypto miners then you only need 10-30% payout from browser miners in order for content creators to break even. But ad in all the readers who never click (like me, the ads are not relevant) this gets more attractive.
If google is smart, they do recognize this as a threat.
And remember that mining is effectively a zero-sum game, the more people mine the harder it becomes to mine. It effectively means that every new websites who switches to mining for monetization makes it less valuable for all the other websites already doing it since you're all sharing the same cake.
So I don’t need to mine a ton, just a little bit. I would actually be cool with a micro transaction program where I just paid them a penny if I thought the visit was worthwhile.
I really liked the flattr model.
That's only true for deflationary currencies. One can conjure up an ad-replacement currency, let's call it impre$$ion, that would be inflationary and perhaps linearly related to the time spent on the page regardless of computing performance of a viewer (though some viewers might be more valuable than others, e.g. those running iOS). Then there could be a separate market/stock-exchange for impre$$ions, replacing ad income. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar was in the works already.
Users knowingly doing cryptomining are probably in the 90%+ adoption rate neighborhood of adblock.
Finally, if users had even an inkling of how their data is bought, sold and aggregated, they may very well prefer a sluggish browser. Maybe not, but it's certainly not a forgone conclusion.
Many adblock users like myself would happily browse with any number of ads, if I could block the tracking by itself.
Google should be much more concerned about stuff like BAT (Basic Attention Token).
For some, it could very well be an alternative.
I still visit those sites anyway.
- chrome extension that have the sole purpose of mining
- chrome extension that covertly mine cryptocurrencies
- malware that has nothing to do with chrome extensions and that mines cryptocurrencies
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted here, but I guess it's because your post comes off as a bit dismissing.