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Comment by rgbrgb | Hacker News Reader

Very interested to see if this could actually be an alternative to ad revenue.

Using http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php :

On my computer (netbook running Chrome in Ubuntu), bitp.it clocks at 2.2khash/sec. Using this, I'll give 2000hash/sec/user as a conservative estimate.

If you had 1M daily visits, averaging about 1 minute of interaction (high, but assuming you have long-form content), you'd have 12000Mhash/day, or about 2.77Mhash/sec.

Plugging this in with current rates, this ends up being $0.08/day. For 1M views. This is about 3 orders of magnitude lower than just AdWords.

And you get tons of angry visitors.

Perhaps this means that bitcoin is currently undervalued by three orders of magnitude.

Or that AdWords is three times as good as bitcoin for revenue generation.

I don't think the fundamentals are sound here. Advertising spurs commerce, which creates value. This wastes electricity, slows down users' computers, and does no valuable computation.

It seems closer to stealing from your users (with enormous inefficiency) than something that creates any real value.

By your logic gold mining is overrated, too.

Not according to cost/benefit analysis.

What does that mean? You can do the same with bitcoin.

A better analogy would have been a store owner mining gold in his background and asking customers to take out the waste away. Something like:

- Since you're going out, anyway...

well I believe it is :{)}

Amen. You spend, on average, say $1-$10 to acquire a customer, but you lose them in a dramatic, angry, disgusted fashion by trying to steal $0.000001 from them.

As they point out -- you would need a visitor to remain on any given page for a relatively long period of time. Works well for long-form content, but breaks down in shorter chunks.

One thing I'm particularly interested in would be embedding this in a frame similar to stumbleupons web interface and allowing for revenue sharing with the user.

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