“An on-page advert was mining bitcoin in my browser”

Re:“An on-page advert was mining bitcoin in my browser” by redm on Tuesday August 29, 2017 @10:30AM (#15124510)

There's not much to discuss here. It's an unsubstantiated claim that seemed to be backed up by the claim of "I looked at the code." Forget these guys claim for a moment; the more interesting discussion is the concept of trading mining resources for service. If it's an ad, it's malware, but if it was opted into by the user, it could be a new type of payment model.

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Re:“An on-page advert was mining bitcoin in my browser” by dspillett on Tuesday August 29, 2017 @10:51AM (#15124665)

> but if it was opted into by the user, it could be a new type of payment model

Something like https://www.nicehash.com/ but delivered in a manner that they layman can agree to by just clicking "go ahead"?

Or, as is far more likely because people tend to do first and ask later, in small print at the bottom of the page "by opening this page you agree to let us use your CPU and GPU resources for what-ever we want, if you want us to stop using your CPU and GPU resources you can opt out by closing this tab/window"...

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Re:“An on-page advert was mining bitcoin in my browser” by devmunchies on Tuesday August 29, 2017 @10:38AM (#15124573)

Trading compute resources for a service is a much better proposition than trading my personal data or behavior for a service. This is interesting.

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Re:“An on-page advert was mining bitcoin in my browser” by LyndsySimon on Tuesday August 29, 2017 @11:00AM (#15124731)

If average CPM is $3, that's $0.003 per individual impression. A quick back-of-a-napkin calculation shows that at current Bitcoin price (~$4,600), you would have to mine for about 100 hours at 1 GH/s to match that.

In reality, jsMiner is the only JavaScript Bitcoin mining utility of which I'm aware, and it only uses CPU. A modern machine's CPU is only going to yield a hashrate of 5 MH/s or so, which means you'd have to mine for them for 20,000 hours to equal the revenue generated by your eyes being exposed to a traditional ad.

In short, your PC is too slow by several orders of magnitude to make this a viable replacement for traditional ads.

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