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How soon before websites try using the CPU of visitors to mine bitcoin? Would that be possible?

It's been done. Link goes to a Javascript-based bitcoin miner that you can embed in a webpage.

About two years ago there was a site called pornocoin or something like that. It used a java bassed gpu miner that was run on the visitors machine to mine for cons while they watched free porn. Thing was that they told you they were doin it and if iI rember correctly, the site did not do to well. However, at the time they probably mined 4-5btc due to the rewards back then. If they held onto it.....

How soon before websites try using the CPU of visitors to mine bitcoin? Would that be possible?

It's been done. Link goes to a Javascript-based bitcoin miner that you can embed in a webpage.

Before you smart ass bitcoin miner kids think you know everything, Website Bitcoin Mining. ;)

Site visitors do the mining, multiple a little slice of power times x million visitors over x amount of days and your localized mining is tiddly winks. This uses the website visitor's machine to mine coins (and this particular example is terribly inefficient itself but the idea is there, someone with the know how could really go the distance for their own mining operation). This can be exceptionally more efficient that running a local mining op on a single machine/small cluster if you have a relatively trafficed website it is running from.

You are focused on high speed precision mining instead of scaled general mining. A pressure washer vs. a regular water hose, the water moves faster through the pressure washer but put 5,000,000 hoses together and you can push insanely more total water per second than a handful of pressure washers.

Any doubts about the cashing out of early adopters that made cheap and easy coin (bitcoin launched 10 months ago, when did you first hear about it?), go to the exchange and click on depth-of-market. There are several sellers offering lots of 1000+ coin (at $7-8 each). Clearly the winners are those who got in early, either mining with no competition or buying the currency eight months ago for 1/100 of it's current value...

Each hour approximately six computer in the world win a prize of 50 coin (based on cpu resources dedicated to solving an increasingly complex math crypto problem), but with the current number of people running the coin mining apps now, it currently would take an average computer years to win 50 coin.

It also seems like some big player or pool is gaming the system by turning their massive compute power on and off. Maybe they've found out how to manipulate the difficulty for max profit before it is recalculated?