Ask HN: Bitcoin mining as an alternative to ad revenue
21 comments
The likelihood that one of your visitors mine one bitcoin is extremely low nowadays. If you work in a pool that doesn’t consist of only your visitors and their limited resources, you will get close to nothing.
Just go burn a few old tires outside. The environmental impact might be similar and you will save time.
Just go burn a few old tires outside. The environmental impact might be similar and you will save time.
Unless you already did, assume whatever the service is, the user is absolutely hooked on and can only use it via this transaction.
Would you still say the same?
Would you still say the same?
Jeremy Rubin built a proof-of-concept for this over a decade ago for a hackathon and ended up being sued by the state of New Jersey. This blog post[0] has a good summary of the events.
[0] https://ethanzuckerman.com/2015/05/28/the-death-of-tidbit-an...
[0] https://ethanzuckerman.com/2015/05/28/the-death-of-tidbit-an...
This guy even said as an alternative to ad-revenue, I felt so clever lol.
Crypto is much more known than when that occurred. Wouldn’t surprise me if something like this would still get sued though.
Crypto is much more known than when that occurred. Wouldn’t surprise me if something like this would still get sued though.
Have ad publishers pay users, instead of pay ad companies.
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.
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.
10 years ago μTorrent tried to package a crypto miner as an install path offer instead of a toolbar and faced incredible backlash.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%9CTorrent#Ads_and_malware
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%9CTorrent#Ads_and_malware
This was done using other coins (not bitcoin) that use cpu. People got creative used free websites that offered a preview of your site at different screen resolutions which would use the site's resources for the mining.
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.
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.
No. Bitcoin is mined with Asics (not even GPUs). Mining with CPU will bring roughly $0 per user and $0 per many thousands of users while burning the CPU/Battery/whatever of these users. Given that alts got destroyed as of late, this means mining as an ad alternative is as good as dead.
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.
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.
A different payment policy for ads, similar to stacker.news, is worth exploring.
it's terribly inefficient. People tried this years ago and it was pretty quickly wiped of the web because people do not tolerate it.
"Mining agents as an ethical alternative to pervasive `ad` system" is considered more legally offensive than ads. Courts and media alike face great difficulty understanding ethics arguments, being left out and uninformed about the Web for too long.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CryptojackingI should’ve said, a method like this would require user consent. Not a lengthy terms and conditions that the user would inevitably ignore but something designed to be really in their face so they can’t use unless they’re well informed.
Could that still be considered unethical? Or is that just more in the air.
Could that still be considered unethical? Or is that just more in the air.
Ultimately just getting them to pay you bitcoin instead (over the lightning network) would be a better option for them as they can give you as much work/energy as you want independent of the capabilities of their device and electricity costs.
Ads worked back in the era where people couldn't make payments online. These days it's just more effective to have them pay, or in some cases, pay to disable the ad.
Great way to get your site blacklisted
That’s a good point. What if the mining was well addressed in advanced?
no.
Obviously this would depend on the type of service, etc, I’m just brainstorming.