Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

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I'll choose 4 every time: pay for services I find valuable with real money and use an ad blocker otherwise.

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.

“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?”

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.

But that's the thing, I really don't think what you're proposing has anything to do with what google wants to ban. What you're talking about is already possible using services like coinhive that can be used to embed a miner on your page instead (or on top) of using regular ads. That doesn't require any extension.

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.

Would it not be better for you (and the rest of the world) if you instead willingly paid them the equivalent portion of your power bill, without actively wasting the resources?

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".

Yes, it definitely would. I just think that it’s easier to mine as it basically does that without having a lot of billing in between.

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.

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