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Comment by johndevor | Hacker News Reader

If it's possible to replace advertising with your CPU cycles, how, exactly, could this hurt the consumer? Sounds like it could benefit the consumer immensely. This could be another form of micropayments for people who might not be able to afford the cash upfront.

What the developer has created actually sounds rather ingenious.

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I think what the state of New Jersey is worried about is either that the authors are being dishonest about the informed nature of the consent, or are viewing this as producing a tool that is too easy to exploit (whatever that means).

Personally, I think that's pretty absurd, but I can understand how a non-technical attorney reading about a MIT student developing something that lets websites mine bitcoins on consumer computers might get the wrong idea. As usual, the hard-headed nature of american prosecutors does us all a disservice.

Edit: rayiner points out that no one is being prosecuted, so I should probably rein in my rhetoric about prosecutors. Still seems like an extreme reaction.

Being worried or unsure does not give the Government a right to harass people. As we seem to both agree, the prosecutors have too much power and way too little common sense.

Well, it's all motivated by money, I suspect. Governments throw a lot of money into these so-called 'cyber-enforcement' agencies anymore. And for prosecutors, administrators, etc..., anything to raise their state/agency/organization's precived status under the blanket of 'cyber' and battling malicious hackers is a gain. Common sense be damned; things like Bitcoins and distributed computing are still magic to most people, so it's really easy for them to take things out of context.

Looks to me like New Jersey is fishing.

Some of the things they are asking for seem to be beyond the capability of anyone to provide, other than a Supreme Deity.

Nobody is being prosecuted. Its an agency issuing a subpoena to get information. That's how agencies get information.

That's true, but there are ways to obtain information that are less aggressive. Having someone call the author, for instance.

You cannot just reply to this "information request" unless you know what the consequences would be to any answer and if one could be potentially incriminating oneself inadvertently. The only sensible solution would be to consult a specialist lawyer and they don't come cheap.

I would guess you are looking at thousands of dollars at a minimum and easily much more.

of course you can reply, only in the USA do you have such a proponderance to rely on the law to ask or respond to questions.

That makes sense, since most of the world's countries have civil law systems, and the US has a common law system.

I thinks it's a little more than that. They are requesting answers to questions framed using language from criminal law with the expectation that the response can be used against them.

It would be great if CPU mining of bitcoin wasn't so laughably inefficient as to be pointless. The hashing rate that Tidbit claims to achieve, if left running continuously at the current difficulty level, would earn about a penny per decade.

This idea has been around for years, Tidbit is nothing new [1]. GPU mining through browsers is just as old [2]. None of this is particularly hard to conceive of or difficult to implement. I would love to know who advised to proceed on this matter and their reasoning.

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=9042.0 [2] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=9876.0

With ASIC miners starting to become common, isn't GPU mining also becoming extremely inefficient?

For small miners, there are plenty of profitable GPU coins.

Considering modern Javascript allows to program WebGL shaders, one could develop a very efficient miner for Srypt-based altcoins and make quite a lot from a popular website.

http://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency/

If sites started doing this (using a visitor's GPUs and Litecoin more likely), the downside to a consumer is the extra cost in electricity (which goes to electricity co, not the website) and lower lifetime of hardware. If it's all opt-in, it's up to the consumer whether they think it's worth their cost to "support" the website. I don't see an offer of removing ads as a benefit because that can easily be done by just installing AdBlockPlus, the real benefit is feeling good about "supporting" a site. (And unless they happen to have a good GPU they'd probably support the site more by just clicking a few ads, or actually sending them real money via any of the micropayment services including bitcoin.)

I think the fear is this happening in the background, without your knowledge, causing you to pay more for electricity or draining your laptop battery.

An infinite loop can do that just as well. Is that illegal now as well?

Intentional infinite loops might be illegal.

Only if the court can prove whether a program halts or not.

Slow clap.

which is possible

I would hope so (if done intentionally and without the user's informed consent). It would be a DoS attack.

It wouldn't happen concealed, this could be similar to a paywall, but you pay with your cpu( read:gpu ) time.

Mobile app ad networks commit all kinds of horrors "in the background."

A trade of unused processing time for displaying the site content. I usually block every ad, but I this is something I would be ok with.

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