I wonder if this could be turned into a legitimate way of supporting open source developers? Run their docker images that have an option to configure running a miner during your down time.
in practice though I think it is not
In practice it's even worse. There's not a sane company in the world that would let some random bitcoin miner run on the same host as their mission critical system anyway.
[1]: https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-accepted-tax-swiss-canton-z...
2. Most people won’t give them money directly.
3. It’s their choice how to monetize their project. It’s your choice to use or not use their project.
Nope.
Please for the love of God don't be sitting around thinking of how to 'help' me in this way…
If you aren't using your computer, who cares. Not like you'll notice.
Tipping someone forces me to pay money I've already earned.
I can't be assed to set up a crypto miner on my laptop and manage the wallet and all that, it's not worth the few bucks to me.
But if it means making a livelihood to an open source developer, who collectively has hundreds of people doing this, yeah I would absolutely do that.
It also lets me support a larger number of devs. I realistically don't want to pay out $5/mo to dozens of devs. (Currently sponsor 4)
But if there's mining software that distributes profits against a pool of devs of my choosing, then sweet -- free money for them!
If you aren't using your computer, you aren't pissing away 500+ watts every hour either.
On top of that, in most of the developed world, you get less money's worth of cryptocurrency out than the cost of the electricity to generate it. So if you really wanted to donate money, you'd donate more by just paying them directly than wasting power, money, and computer hardware life on generating cryptocurrency
In Germany it's 30 eurocents/kWh. That's a decent electricity bill.