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Comment by cookiecaper | Hacker News Reader

It is bad to use a bunch of the user's CPU without any notice. They will probably notice that your site makes their computer slow and never come back again. Also, once they find out you've been using their CPU power/electricity/battery life surreptitiously for private, unshared gain, you will probably have some angry customers.

Additionally, does this automatically hook in to slush's pool or something? Bitcoin mining is practically useless on CPU; even the fastest CPUs out get way, way less than 10mhash. The average length of time to find a block at 9999khash and current difficulty is 1200+ days, so even that estimate is over-optimistic, so this isn't worth anything if your users don't sit on your site for 5 years+, unless it's hooked into a pool or some other contraption to pay on shares instead of blocks.

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Interestingly, from post #9:

  Chrome13-canary: ~15.2k/s
  FF4: ~6.4k/s
  Safari5: ~6.2k/s
  IE9: ~1.6k/s

So yeah, massively massively slower than regular GPU mining. Anyone know of a way to push WebGL into doing hashing functions, and reading the results out?

If you can have shaders in WebGL with integer ops (bitshifts, xor) you could do it.

And if that's all IE9 does, how about the 40-60% of visitors using earlier IE versions with even worse JS performance (and no WebGL, of course).

This doesn't seem particularly viable, but it is a nice effort.

Cribbing from post #35:

And you come to a total of 21,600,000 unique visitors per day that you would need to your website in order to hash the equivalent of a $100 GPU.

Or make about $8 per day according to the bitcoin calculator right now from 21 million unique visitors.... totally not worth it.

So, yeah. Significantly crapping on the user experience of 21M people by reducing their battery life, adding heat, adding fan noise, slowing down other actions - all to substitute for one gpu?

It seems like there must be better ways to ruin your high traffic websites reputation if that's what you're looking to do.

And I should add that the prospects of finding any meaningful amount of shares, while much better than finding a block, are still quite low. My GPU can find a couple of shares per minute in a good minute, but it operates at 55.5Mhash, over 10x faster than my CPU (i7-2600K). Consider that most are going to have really slow CPUs and share the processor power with other heavy applications (Flash games), and you might get one share from the best computers in an average 10-20 minute visit if you're lucky. Shares are worth increasingly little and it depends on how you calculate what each share is worth (since btc generation is really totally based on blocks and each pool decides the value / share on its own, etc.), but I really doubt this is a viable replacement for advertisements or any other money-making endeavor for anyone, even the largest websites where people spend lots of time (Facebook, gmail).

That was my first though - it's a nice idea, but came at least one year too late. Just yesterday, I ran miner through the www.bitcoinplus.com website, and on my regular PC machine it generated 0.002 BTC in 24 hours.

I am afraid the bitcoin mining is practically over, and the much more interesting question is - should I really invest my real money to buy some bitcoins? (current rate is about 7 USD). I am curious to learn what other HN-ers think of all this stuff.

An economist's take on bitcoin: http://www.quora.com/Is-the-cryptocurrency-Bitcoin-a-good-id...

Spoiler: bitcoin is a scam

Even if he is right and bitcoin shouldn't be considered a "currency", but rather an asset or a scam to enrich the early adopters, I think there is still a question I wrote above, namely, if it is worth to buy bitcoins for money now.

He might be an economist, but he doesn't know anything about monetary history:

The economic assumptions underpinning the Bitcoin ecosystem are laughable, and ignore hundreds of years of accumulated understanding of how currencies work with each other.

Paper money is about 100 years old. That's it.

By "paper money" do you (and the article's author) actually mean "fiat money" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_money) dating back 11th century China? It was in use as early as 18th century America.

The only thing about "paper money" that I can think of that is about 100 years old is the beginning of the departure from the gold standard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard).

And of course the older things are the better they are. For example, we all now 1000 year old medical practices are good and effective whereas recently developed ones suck.

... why would it be true for economic practices? Some experimentation is good, without it there would never be any progress at all.

Appeal to authority based on the age of ideas is something you can only get away with in religion, astrology, and it seems, economic 'science'.

Sure, there is a large chance that new ideas might fail but you can't simply argue against them because they go against old ideas.

I was at the Bank of England museum checking out the first "notes" the other day, and they date back to 1694. That's a little older than 100 years.

There's quite a bit of misunderstanding in that post, especially with respect to systemic weaknesses. And a lot of unsubstantiated claims and terrifying graphs (like that tweet graph as something desirable for currency inflation - what it also implies is your savings going up in smoke).

I'd love to find an in-depth debate on Bitcoin from an economic standpoint, but this is not it. It's just more of the same half-understood FUD. And it is a horrible idea when half-understood - IMO, it remains to be seen if it's a horrible idea when fully-understood.

BitCoin i svery similar to a gold backed currency. The fact that nearly all (?) currencies moved off the gold standard should tell you something of how economists view the gold standard.

and economists are always right?, how come so few saw the 2008 crash coming?

bitcoin is born out of a distrust with the current global economic status quo

If you are a subscriber to Peter Schiff's views then moving off the gold standard was actually a big mistake. The comparison to the gold standard is actually what makes me think bitcoin has some legs

How is bitcoin like the gold standard? Bitcoin is backed by what? It's more like a purely speculative currency. It's artificially scarce and worth nothing apart from it's perceived value. At least with gold there are many industrial uses for it. You can't do anything with a bitcoin other than trade it.

It's artificially scarce and worth nothing apart from it's perceived value.

Are there any official currencies that this doesn't apply to?

You have to pay taxes and also settle debts in the official currency. That alone gives it more than mere 'perceived value'. Oh, needing it to buy oil also helps.

Precisely. Holding an official currency gives you the ability to stop the government from putting you in prison for nonpayment of taxes. This is a real tangible value that is a sort of baseline value store for official currencies that does not exist for other currencies.

So, it's just a combination of money = power, and "All power comes from the end of a gun."

Power doesn't come from the gun, but from public legitimacy. In the same manner that it would be considered legitimate for someone to defend themselves with a gun.

That was a reference to Mao.

So, we need a gun store that uses bitcoins.

Governments moved their currencies off the gold standard. Mostly for the self-interest reason of establishing greater control over their currency, often to inflate their way out of debt.

Whether a gold (or Bitcoin) standard is good for the world economy as a whole is irrelevant, since the governments hold the power to implement it (or ban Bitcoin) and will act in their self-interest.

The tweet graph is meant to correlate with desirable growth in money supply, something Bitcoin needs to be liquid. You can have growth in money supply without inflation.

Somebody can fork bitcoin and change that aspect.

Weren't "the economists" blamed for the global crisis in the first place?

He is a software developer at "SeatGeek", not an economist. He wrote "Internet Economist" as a joke.

He graphs the number of bitcoins over time, which is basically meaningless. If he were to graph the number of transactions, the number of users, or the total value of all bitcoins, he'd get an exponential curve upwards much like the twitter curve.

I am investing $100 right now to hold long-term, with an 80-90% expectation of it being worthless in a few years.

The alternative, of course, is that bitcoin takes off, is not banned by governments, and is useful enough to enough people. If that occurs then I expect pretty high returns.

way, way less than 10mhash

s/mhash/Mhash/

that's a bit pedantic, ya know... the number only means something to people who know the system even a little bit, and they'll immediately translate to the proper unit because 10 milli-hashes per second makes no sense. Unless you're mining by hand.

It's like ranting that people talk about "10mb" files. Or "100gb" or "100GB" drives. When they're technically "93.1GiB" drives ("gibibyte" [1],[2], or [3]).

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive#Capacity_measur... [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mebibyte [3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix

Ironically - your example speaks against itself. 100GB Drive is a very precise and agreed upon way of referring to a drive - it means 1x10^11 bytes. 93.1 GiB drive is unusual - we don't typically use powers of 2 when referring to drive length - so if you really mean 93.1 GiB, then it's important you call it out as such, or people (storage admins, driver manufacturers, and operating system developers) will understand you to mean 1X10^11 bytes when you say 100 Gigabytes. Precision has it's place.

I thought this was the common way (gibi that is) to refer to harddrives in the OS, I thought that that was the reason harddrives were 100gb when i bought them but only showed up as 93gb on my computer.

It is. Everyone except the hard drive manufacturers uses GiB for technical reasons. Hard drive manufacturers use GB for marketing (and clarity, but mostly marketing) reasons.

It used to be common to speak of sizes in "hard drive megabytes". Eventually, the disk manufacturers won the pointless semantic battle and that went away.

In practice, it matters not in the slightest.

Yet another case where "the common way" is wrong and disgusting. Nothing new here.

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