Obviously this would depend on the type of service, etc, I’m just brainstorming.
Just go burn a few old tires outside. The environmental impact might be similar and you will save time.
Would you still say the same?
[0] https://ethanzuckerman.com/2015/05/28/the-death-of-tidbit-an...
Crypto is much more known than when that occurred. Wouldn’t surprise me if something like this would still get sued though.
Instead of make an ad that already consumes the visitor's attention to also consume their cpu, and this to enrich the ad-tech company, consider making a website pay the visitor for having their attention consumed by the ad instead of pay the ad-tech company.
This would be open to abuse by visitors, where visitors reload a page over and over to get paid. To prevent this type of abuse, require visitors to submit money as collateral to the website. Users pay $x per month to be part of this "ad network". If users view and get paid for more pages than their submitted collateral, they keep the money the ad paid them but they don't get their collateral back. In a way this forces users to pick which pages to visit.
People still use it to mine while you are viewing a video. But browsers got around to blocking and labeling as this as malware.
For historical context 14 years ago it was an option: https://github.com/progranism/Bitcoin-JavaScript-Miner
Don't waste your time. You are better off trying to guess a bitcoin hash.
The really closest thing is something like stacker.news where users pay micro-dollars using lightening. There is also a podcast app. But from experience, these do not seem to scale very well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CryptojackingCould that still be considered unethical? Or is that just more in the air.