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Comment by madisfun | Hacker News Reader

If I did the math right, then if the notebook I typing this comment on mined at 100% CPU load for 1 hour, the payout to the script owner would be equivalent to US$0.00085. For nearly 200 Wh consumed, or 70g CO2 equivalent, or $0.004/kWh. That's two orders of magnitude less than the cost of the energy consumed, supposedly somewhere around 3% efficiency.

I suppose asking for donations/selling subscriptions/products/whatever is more sustainable. Even if 3 users out of 100 agreed to donate/pay the monetary equivalent of 1 kWh (~ $0.140), the site owner would receive more than forcing 100 users to heat the air for one hour and putting 7kg CO2 in the atmosphere.

The web doesn't need browser-based mining. The web needs affordable and convenient microtransactions. With something better than a 0.05 + 5% fee.

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It seems to me the problem its solving isn't efficiently 'mining' the currency, its efficiently transferring small amounts of money. If there was a way a website could present a button I could use to flip them a penny (without a complicated setup or previous relationship with them) on my way thru if I like the content, I'd smash that thing all day long.

The telling thing is that people are seriously considering a system that wastes 97% of the money in the tiny transaction to easily transfer the 3%.

Essentially the problem with micropayments is microscams: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15592192

Stealth browser-mining lets everyone skip all the genuine attempts at transferring value and go straight to microscams.

Edit: hoisted body of comment: "Unsolved, difficult problems of micropayments"

- pay before viewing: how do you know that the thing you're paying for is the thing that you're expecting? What if it's a rickroll or goatse?

- so do you give refunds a la steam?

- pay and adverts: double-dipping is very annoying

- pay and adverts: how do you know who you're paying? A page appears with a micropayment request, but how do you know you've not just paid the advertiser to view their ad?

- pay and frame: can you have multiple payees per displayed page? (this has good and bad ideas)

- pay and popups: it's going to be like those notification or app install modals, yet another annoyance for people to bounce off

- pay limits: contactless has a £30 limit here. Would you have the same payment system suitable for $.01 payments and $1000 payments? How easy is it to trick people into paying over the odds (see refunds)?

- pay and censors: who's excluded from the payment system? Why?

Essentially the problem with micropayments is microscams.

Part 2: business model problems!

- getting money into the system is plagued by usual fraud problems of card TX for pure digital goods

- nobody wants to build a federated system; everyone wants to build a Play/Apple/Steam store where they take 30%

- winner-take-all effects are strong

- Play store et al already exist, why not use that?

- Free substitute goods are just a click away

- Consumers will pirate anything no matter how cheap the original is

- No real consumer demand for micropayments

=> lemma from previous 3 items: market for online goods is efficient enough to drive all marginal prices to zero

- existing problem of the play store letting your kid spend all the money

- friction: it would be great if you didn't have to repeatedly approve things, such as a micropayment for every page of a webcomic archive. But blanket approval lets bad actors drain the jar or inattentive users waste it and then feel conned

- first most obvious model for making this work is porn, which is inevitably blacklisted by the payment processors, has a worse environment for fraud/chargebacks, and is toxic to VCs (see Patreon and even Craigslist)

- Internet has actually killed previously working micropayment systems such as Minitel, paid ringtones (anyone remember the dark era of Crazy Frog?); surviving ones like premium SMS and phone have a scammy, seedy feel.

- accounting requirements: do you have to pay VAT on that micropayment? do you have to declare it? Is it a federal offence to sell something to an Iranian or North Korean for one cent?

Proof-of-waste systems need to be subject to a global ban like CFCs and tetraethyl lead.

I don't understand why so many are still blind to these very serious problems and praise crypto currencies. I see mining as bigger problem than spam.

Ironically years ago people were proposing proof-of-waste systems to stop spam. Fortunately they gave up.

«I don't understand why so many are still blind to these very serious problems...»

Because something that consumes a fraction of a fraction of one percent of the energy consumed by the world is not a "serious" energy problem, no matter what silly comparisons people make, like saying Bitcoin miners consume more than Ireland when it turns out that Ireland consumes so little electricity that it could be supplied by a single hydroelectric plant.

Something that's actually a serious problem would be, for example, the fact the world wastes more energy than it uses every year: https://www.businessinsider.com/worlds-dirty-energy-comes-fr...

There is also a lot of misinformation being published. For example uninformed journalists claiming that miners in China use coal power, when in fact most are located in the Sichuan province because there is plenty of cheap hydroelectricity over there.

I have studied mining for many years, and IMHO it is so ruthlessly competitive that I see the mining industry moving toward building or buying & retrofitting their own hydro/solar/wind power plants optimized for mining for two reasons. (1) Renewables have now become the cheapest source of energy. And (2) many costs of traditional power plants can be avoided when you design a power source specifically for mining (eg. a solar plant can avoid having to convert and transport AC currents on long distance and instead produce DC for immediate consumption by nearby equipment.) If mining ever gets to that point of large scale renewables power plants optimized for mining, we will probably see many net beneficial side-effects, such as the increased production of solar panels for miners causing the cost of solar to decrease for the rest of the world.

Finally, if mining ever gets so profitable that it warrants consuming much more than one percent of the world's production of electricity, then it means something would have pushed the value of cryptocurrencies very high. This something can only be a major event, such as the world realizing cryptocurrencies have enormous social and economic benefits. (I can't see speculation alone pushing and maintaining high prices long enough to matter.)

If, on the other hand, cryptocurrencies turn out to be mostly useless, then their value will remain low, and miners will never consume excessive amounts of energy.

You are basically worried about a non-problem. Miners will only use very large amounts of energy if cryptocurrencies are actually very useful for society, ie. if pros exceeds cons.

I've noticed after browsing crypto stuff the processor often goes to near 100%, presumably javascript mining in the background. Bit of a pain in the neck. Also the Metamask extension seemed to be doing similar so I've had to turn the thing off.

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