As long as there is disclosure of it and the mining is relatively efficient, that is a very interesting business model. The site collects revenue relative to the amount of time users spend on the site and not the number of page/ad views. It is also a pretty seamless way to integrate micropayments from users into a site. Handing over a credit card number or similar is a big barrier to overcome while this requires no setup for the user. As a user I might prefer this to ads in certain circumstances.

I'd definitely prefer this to ads in a world where phone software and hardware improved energy capacity and efficiency at a faster rate than applications bloat.

I don't think we've reached that point yet. An iPhone doesn't last a single day if you use it the whole time, it would barely last for hours mining constantly.

Are you using tpb in your phone? I don't see why that would be an issue then

Though I agree this monetization tactic doesn't work on mobile

Why wouldn't you? There are multiple torrent clients for Android (don't know about iOS). Plus if you have a seedbox, you can add torrents from your phone - Transdroid/Transdrone are pretty good.

To add one more question to the one raverbashing posted: How long do you even keep TPB in the background on your phone for it to consume your entire battery?

Paying 50 cents requires you to keep their mining browser tab open for around a week with your CPU churning. Somehow I don't think that's the solution.

WebAssembly with OpenGL could change this.

No it won't. If everyone is mining more efficiently then the difficulty will rise.

Most miners already use GPUs (or ASICs depending on the coin). WebGL would let websites get a relatively larger piece of the pie from dedicated miners.

As it always is with cryptocurrency. It's not sustainable, but at the moment a wasm + WebGL solution is better than plain JS. That's all I meant.

I don't know what they would have to be mining to make cpu's or integrated GPU's make sense, certainly not bitcoin where even if you pay nothing for electricity to are unlikely to be able to do any useful work in the time someone visits your site.

PirateBay probably won't make any money. I'm considering adding this to an online game, which would probably generate a modest income. Video and social media sites could definitely benefit as well.

I think this would be fine as long as you have the users' consent. I suppose you could even give out rewards to players based on how much they contribute. I see this model in a lot of Android games nowadays (although with ads), you are asked to look at an ad/watch a 30 second video, and in return you get a small amount of in-game currency otherwise only obtainable through spending money.

In the discussion yesterday I estimated 2-5 cents per 24 hours of mining on a users machine (based on quoted hashrates and current prices). That's really not much, even if people actively let it run to help and there is a medium efficiency gain to have somewhere.

What game is that? I want to be sure to avoid it if you are planning such scummy tactics.

It's a card game simulator I have yet to publish. I don't really have a lot of money for server uptime, so it's either ads or this. And it won't be on by default. I'm simply offering users a way to support the site if they like using it, without having to view ads or pay directly (it may or may not affect their electricity bill I guess, but to most people an online game using some extra CPU isn't going to have much impact on them at all).

You can't afford $9/month? Don't bother implementing this feature and you earned a few months of uptime.

None of that comment even close to makes sense.

1. My operating costs are more than $9/month. I don't know where you got that presumed feature but it's wrong.

2. There's nothing to implement. You include a library and a few lines of code to start it and you're done.

3. How would not doing something that could potentially make me money, even if only a little bit, save me money? That makes zero sense.

You are talking about server costs. Get a server at for example online.net (not affiliated) for $9/month or cheaper. That server is going to be able to run your card game easily.

You don't need to spend hundreds of dollars on AWS.

You don't know what my site requires, so you're assuming that whatever hosting you just randomly want to assume is sufficient is enough and so you can discredit my legitimate idea for a possible way to get the required cost to run my site, and possibly also make a little profit. Would you rather have me borrow user's time and attention with ads, or bottom a few of their precious millions of CPU cycles per second? And in case you didn't read what I wrote, I'm not "stealing" anything. The site will be hosted either way, if I have to pay for it out of pocket at a loss then fine. But if people would like to donate CPU time to support the project, there is an off-by-default option to do so, just like there's an off-by-default option to donate money. I fail to see how this is evil.

Ads obviously, as long as you're not using them to spread different kind of malware. It doesn't matter that much to me personally, I'll be blocking whatever garbage you put out anyway, but ads are objectively the better choice as they dont needlessly wreck the environment any further, nor cause unnecessary wear and tear on the hardware of your users.

Anyway, I'd be very interested in hearing how a card game simulator requires more than 8gb of memory and a decent cpu.

God, would you shut up? Jesus, sorry to burst your bubble but people are running their damn CPUs no matter what I do. I heard that some people would prefer client-side mining to ads and I thought I might give that option for those that want it. But I guess that'll cause the Apocalypse next Friday so I'll just go host my application at online.com™ for the low low price of $9 a month, since it's just a card game and can't possibly require anything more than that! Any idiot could see that I don't need to pollute the air and melt the ice caps by trying to give my users options and help support the development of fun internet sites! Could you be any more condescending?

Nope. If you post your idea on a public forum I will be responding with my opinion. Feel free to stop posting if you don't want my replies.

I'm also genuinely curious what kind of card game has such intensive server requirements because I just don't see it. Maybe you have a legitimate need to contribute to global warming, it just seems unlikely to me.

I'm sure it's entirely possible that I can run my application within the arbitrary limitations that you have set for me. I have a MongoDB and Express stack primarily. Sorry that I didn't know that online.com™ can host my application with 8 gigs of RAM for just $9 a month. I came into this damn thread wondering if maybe someone thought this was a good idea from the point of view of user experience. I don't care whatsoever about the planet. Not a bit. If my computer brings about the next Ice Age, fine. I'm a webdev, I saw an idea I liked, you ruthlessly shot me down because apparently it's going to harm you in some way. Honestly, I'd like to make a little money to pay my student loans off with, but that's not about to happen. So maybe, just maybe, I don't care how wonderfully cheap and capable the server you just randomly decided I should use is. I saw a cool idea, I wanted to implement it in an open and honest way for those users that wanted it. Sorry for destroying the planet with curiosity.

Sounds like olyou should take a refresher ethics course. And if not that, a business course because you're just going to drive your idea into the ground the way you're going. There's your feedback.

By the way, users will instantly close your game if you cause their cpu fans to spin up to 100%

Good luck with your doomed project :)

You do know what throttling and debouncing are right? Or do you need to take an actual computer science class?

Of course. I also know you're not going to earn any remotely significant amount of money from crypto currency mining if you do that.

You're looking to monetize. That makes it a business. If not we're back to square one, skip out on a Starbucks and just pay for your server costs yourself rather than fucking over your users :)

Maybe if you manage to create something worthwhile people will be willing to pay you some money. It's not like you need much of it for a single server. Consider it an opportunity to learn how to not piss away money/time.

> Ads obviously

You'd have a better argument if the TechCrunch homepage didn't use 50% of my CPU just to render all the ads.

I mean isn't 50% better than the 100% that these crypto miners do? And those miners keep going for as long as you have the page open, not just while scrolling.

Of course inefficient ads are also horrible.

What if you could choose a "support level" or unlock features by donating more resources? I'm thinking out loud here, but I've never heard of customer-donated CPU as a business model and there might be something here. For an author trying to monetize content online all of the "normal" options are pretty bad right now. I think most digital entertainment just isn't very valuable these days, but I'll bet the mining thing has some characteristics that compare favorably to both ads and (micro)payments.

Of course, if it was a viable strategy, wouldn't some malware authors write the malware to do this instead of ransoming files? Has that been tried? Is it a thing?

The main problem for legitimate operations is that the user will spend far more on electricity than what the site operator will earn, especially with implementations running in the browser which still aren't yet able to be as performant as you would like. With that in mind a direct exchange of currency for features/access makes a lot more sense unless you want to trick your users. Most won't realize why their power bill is so high.

There are malwares that mine crypto currencies, usually while the machine is idle as to not alert the user that something is up with their machine. However these profits are also quite low since you're using mostly low end machines.

Crypto lockers are of course way more evil, but they function just as well on low quality hardware so I can understand why malware authors do it.

You prefer s/he didn't provide the option? Dude wants to make some money for his/her effort. Chill.

Yes. Websites stealing cpu time to mine crypto currency is ridiculous. I'd go as far as calling it malware. It's a waste of my power and will wear out my hardware faster than necessary. It's also bad for the environment due to useless power drain.

If we're talking about a server for a card game you can just get a cheapo dedicated server and you'll be fine. Get a user or two to donate once a month and you will even run a profit. Or skip that Starbucks once a month.

> Websites stealing cpu time to mine crypto currency is ridiculous

It is being offered as an option, not being stolen.

> Get a user or two to donate once a month and you will even run a profit. Or skip that Starbucks once a month.

I want to make millions of dollars so that I can build schools for children, why are you limiting the value of my effort and creation?

Because there is a 99% chance that you are going to fail. Sorry but your card game isn't going to save the world, let's not wreck it while trying.

You don't even know what my card game is.

It's a decentralized uncensorable poker game with no rake that makes money from light client-side mining of relatively cpu efficient coins - you don't think I can build a single school from that?

And you can use another card game. Get over it, as long as it's disclosed everyone involved are consenting.

Sure thing. I can also block whatever crap I don't want running in my browser so I'll be doing that. Just giving feedback.

The real environmental cost of ads is when people actually buy the useless shit being advertised. Also, you definitely have a strange attitude toward mining cryptocoins client-side and are engaging in many assumptions and false notions (that 100% of CPU will be used, that ad-tracking doesn't use just as many cycles, that it's not opt-in, etc.)

It's actually quite simple, any website that makes my laptop fans spin up gets closed out. None of the websites with ads trigger this behavior. The cryptominers do. If you look at actual CPU usage you will notice the obvious difference.

This makes sense, since the entire idea of crypto currency mining is to use CPU cycles to mine the crypto currency. While ads is just some basic tracking and graphics.

What about what he said implies he's doing it in a scummy way? Something like this, opt in and transparent, would be much preferred over microtransactions or ads, IMO.

They’re mining Monero.

> and the mining is relatively efficient

That's a huge "if"; it's my understanding that most cryptocurrencies are currently only efficient with ASICs.

Efficiency doesn't mean profitable. Traditional miners require profitability while this system would only require some unknown level of efficiency. The equipment costs is basically negligible because you are using idle capacity of existing hardware. The marginal revenue also doesn't need to beat electricity costs because the people paying the electricity are not the ones who are receiving the revenue. For example if every $1 of electricity generated $0.90 of revenue, that would be equivalent to the site paying a 10% fee on the micropayments they receive. That would likely be perfectly acceptable to both sides.

Monero is designed to be mined more efficiently with CPUs, or rather, not give such a huge advantage to GPU or dedicated systems (I've read that GPU mining is only 2x the performance of a roughly equivalent CPU, instead of 1000+x as with bitcoin).

Bitcoin, sure. Many are resistant and are still mined with GPUs though.

As long as that's the case, maybe (and even then I don't think it would be) but as it is now, what entity ensures that sites actually use the mining as payment and not simply make you pay the whole time?

How would you negotiate prices if your customers are not even aware how much they are paying?

I think browsers and OSes need to improve to make mining in the background possible such that the UX is not hampered in any way. Right now, with Javascript in the same thread as the UI, that seems not really possible.

They already have. It’s called using a web worker.

Still, such threads get the same priority as other threads, instead of running in pure idle time.

Most ads are also priced in a way that takes the amount of viewability in to account too, so this feature is not unique to browser mining.

I wonder how many users experience their computer slowing to a crawl with such soft-/malware.

CPU mining is so unprofitable, but I suppose with thousands of users..

It's not unprofitable if you aren't the one carrying the costs. It's inefficient though, that's for sure.

I recall that for Bitcoin, the profit was something like a billionth of a cent per user-hour. So it would be hard to be profitable even if all you're paying for is a little engineer time to deploy it.

I assumed this whole notion of browser mining as a replacement for ads was just a laugh, but maybe not. Are there coins where it can actually make a noticeable amount of money?

That's the reason TPB is using Monero. It was specifically designed to be mined on consumer CPUs with little to no benefit to running on a GPU or ASIC.

That's partially incorrect. While XMR is very resistant to ASICs and not very GPU friendly, a high-end consumer GPU will still mine over 2x as much as a high-end consumer CPU.

edit: of course because the majority of users have integrated gpus, cpu mining will typically be faster.

Bitcoin quickly moved to GPUs and then ASICs, making mining them with CPUs pointless. Some coins are designed to be very difficult to mine with GPUs or ASICs, so a Browser based miner isn't so ridiculous. Wasm also makes it a bit faster.

What sort of return per user-hour would you be looking at with one of those?

According to the reddit thread on the matter, even at TPB's scale they were looking at only < $500 a month.

I wonder why CoinHive isn't using WebGL for this.

Quoting CoinHive's site:

> [...] There are solutions to run the Cryptonight algorithm on a GPU instead, but the benefit is about 2x, not 10000x like for other algorithms used by Bitcoin or Ethereum. This makes Cryptonight a nice target for JavaScript and the Browser. [...] Our miner uses WebAssembly and runs with about 65% of the performance of a native Miner. [...]

Can you actually use WebGL for this? I mean, don't you need a user-visible graphics context? That's a serious question, I have used WebGL only once in my life and that was years ago.

On the other hand, WebGPU looks exactly like the kind of technology that would make web-based GPU-enabled bitcoin mining realistic.

It doesn't have to be visible. You can use display: none or whatever to hide it.

You could put it off screen.

But if most users have integrated graphics, and even with dedicated graphics cards the improvement is nowhere near an order of magnitude, would it be much better?

That $500 was probably what they made within the hours they tested the code, as they do millions of pageviews an hour. Reddit still thinks they're lucky to cover a handful of servers LOL.

For BTC, sure. For XMR, maybe not. And the site doesn't carry the load.

Not for XMR. There's quite a few altcoins out there aiming to solve the asic problem with aggressively anti-asic algorithms.

There is an interesting position that asic mining is the most democratic and decentralized way. The easier and simpler and cheaper a miner is to produce, the more accessible it is and likely that companies can manufacture and distribute it, turning it into a commodity. Complex proofs that require cpu's, for example, hand a permanent monopoly to Intel and friends. When the nanometer race ends in a few product generations (as we reach the limits of physics), the more commoditized silicon will become, and the more likely we can get a miner for a couple of bucks at the grocery store, or embed it in devices, etc. - making it truly decentralized.

Historically, those companies have held and mined with the current generation of ASICs (that their customers have paid for!), while they develop the next generation.

Once they have the next generation off the production line, they take the used previous generation, box them up and ship them off to their customers, and then plug the new generation into their mining pools.

If we could trust ASIC manufacturers to not sit on the best hardware, you might be right. However, for the moment everyone can get their hands on CPUs and GPUs of roughly the same power, while easily accessible ASICs are several orders of magnitude slower than the current state of the art.

What do you mean by unprofitable?

If you have cheap (or free) power, it's absolutely profitable.

EDIT: I see you meant CPU mining, not mining in general. My mistake!

People are fixated on power, but this browser miningware doesn't even pay for the wear on your machine.

Not for XMR: a good 6+ core cpu will mine 1/3 to 1/2 of what a 1080ti mines using the native miners.

How would one implement this? Couldn't you just rip it off their website?