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I sure hope this doesn't become a thing, and if it does, that existing ad blocking and/or anti-malware tools pick it up and warn the user against it.

When you start appropriating other peoples' computers for your own purposes, secretly, without their approval, that's called a bot net.

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yeah, but think of the pro: "you can help pay for this website by pressing this button and leaving this window open for an hour". You could help SETI by just visiting a URL.

By fertile pasture I mean that both malevolent and benevolent communities will support this. This could see a lot of optimization if open sourced (is it?).

If it's voluntary on the user's part, then I'd be all for it. I was more concerned about the "in the background without attracting attention" part, which implies that it is done behind the user's back. I could see users opting into distributed computing tasks if given the choice.

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