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Comment by efnx | Hacker News Reader

How would you feel about a free game spending one frame per second mining a cryptocurrency? This would be as an alternative to a one-time purchase (and as an alternative to ads). So, you could play a full game for free, indefinitely, and have a small portion of compute do mining, and at any time you could pay a one time fee (purchase) to turn off mining forever.

(Edit: added stuff in parens)

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I feel the same way about crypto as I do about those herbal supplements at gas stations. It's not that they're inherently problematic, but everyone involved turns out to be scammers consistently enough that automatic distrust is a fantastic rule of thumb.

I think that's definitely a prevalent sentiment. There are enough scams that the stereotype is probably well earned.

This comment makes me feel so sad. I lack the words to describe what critical essence this question is missing, but technology used to mean a hacker ethos of just doing things because they seemed cool and worth doing and even just the ask of this feels parasitic by comparison. Sign of the times.

Eh, I think this falls right into the traditional hacker ethos of doing what seems cool, it's just that what you think is cool may be different than what I think is cool.

I want to make games, but I know how much time that takes, so I understand that to make something cool I need funding to be able to focus on that cool thing. Crypto can be a tool in this case, and I personally would prefer mining to watching ads.

Hackers are great and analyzing systems and figuring out what they might support, despite the original designer's intentions.

I'm gonna drop a sad truth on you: even the greatest hackers of old had to make money somehow.

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