Embeddable Bitcoin Miner for Websites | Hacker News Reader

Embeddable Bitcoin Miner for Websites

bitcoinplus.com

5 pointsdnadolny13 comments

I'd show some stats on the website, like how much mined in previous 24hrs, how much the individual pc is contributing, other sites that run the widget.

Make the user feel appreciated.

Give them the option to turn it off, or throttle down. Check out the Wibiya toolbar and how that can be switched off. Build a network.

Also, consider making the mining as part of a captcha mechanism.

I've made an option to add controls, which shows the current hashrate and a start/stop button. Right now it's up to the websites using it to enable that if they want to.

I like the captcha idea, I've actually been planning something like that. I've got some changes I need to make to my infrastructure before I can do that, but I'm hoping to do it (or let other people do it with the API I'm going to offer).

Thanks for the advice about making the user feel appreciated, I think that's quite important.

You've got to keep your eye out on how to access the full power of the client's GPU. I just saw how IE9 and FF4 offer GPU acceleration http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7VLB4DcXhg

Also, when the user is scrolling the page can you throttle down, so basically the idea is not detract from the user experience. On-demand throttling down somehow. Maybe when a tab is not visible.

Yeah, I'd really like to use the GPU, it would be a huge speed boost.

Was it lagging when you were scrolling down? I try to play nice with the CPU and run it at low priority, so it shouldn't interfere. What OS/browser/java version combo has trouble?

I don't have Java installed and don't want to install it. I wonder if internet cafes and kiosks would be interested in something like this. You could create a url shortener that place their homepage in a frame or something.

We really think alike - the captcha idea, and the URL shortener with a miner at the top were two of my first ideas for uses of an API.

I didn't think of marketing it to internet cafes/kiosks though.

Ha that's great. I've already thought through a lot of this.

One thing that'd be interesting is just to have a donate bitcoin button/address as part of the widget. "You don't get shit you don't ask for"

Also, the way I see bitcoin becoming more popular is when it's offered as change. So if a person wants to donate with credit card say $5.00, they can get like $2 back in bitcoin. Next site they visit they might donate with the bitcoin. In fact, simply tracking what a user visits and then allowing them to donate at a later time to all of them is the key.

-- add: also talk to hotels, hostels and those that they outsource to for their PCs. Upvote my suggestions if you like them!

Wow. I'd like a list of sites that use this, so that I know to never do business with them.

Can I ask why?

The way I see it, websites with advertisements use your mind (by grabbing your attention). This only uses your computer. Which would you rather have a website try to take over?

You really think you'll get effective monetization out of a Bitcoin miner that's written in JavaScript and only run on people's short one-minute visits to a website?

Bitcoin mining is orders of magnitude more efficient on a GPU than on a CPU, and that's compared to the fastest C++ clients, not something running in a JavaScript interpreter. Maybe a popular installable game that's played for hours at a time and uses people's excess GPU to mine Bitcoin could be profitable. But this is just a waste of everyone's time.

This one isn't javascript, it's based on my browser bitcoin miner[1] which is written in Java. It's about 2000 times faster than the javascript bitcoin miner that I know of.

It's around 30-40% slower than one of the optimized C CPU miners, and of course it's a a lot slower than a GPU miner, but it mines at a reasonable rate (and it starts up quickly)

As for effective monetization, this is something you can run in addition to regular ads if you wanted, since it doesn't take up any screen space.

[1] - http://www.bitcoinplus.com/generate

Oh good. So not only does it spike my CPU and kill my battery, I also get the resource overhead of the JVM. This is a reverse DDOS.

Sorry if I'm being too hostile, but I like the idea of bitcoin, and don't want to see it become associated with hijacking people's computers.

No need to apologize for how you feel - some people love the idea (of supporting a website with their computer power), some people hate it.

As for the resource overhead of the JVM, it's infeasible to have a bitcoin miner that uses javascript - that was how I did it initially, as a proof of concept, but it was so slow I abandoned it.

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