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Ask Slashdot: Would You Accept 'Bitcoin-Ware' Apps?
After the E-Sports Entertainment Association admitted to sneaking Bitcoin-mining code into its client software, an anonymous reader writes "I thought that could have been a pretty clever idea, if it was made clear to the users that they could get the app and run it for free as long as, let's say, they accept that it would be run for Bitcoin mining for five hours a week, when their computer is idle. That could make a lot of profit for the developers if their app is truly successful, and without the users having to pay much (only a limited number of hours per week, and if the user is no longer running the app then it won't try to mine anymore). What do you think about this?"
So that I can remove the Bitcoin bits.
So basically you're proposing a move from just give me a little cash upfront to let me leech off your electricity bill in a ridiculously circuitous way to gamble for BTC (keeping in mind that the more people that adopt your model of "BitCoin-Ware" the more people will be vying for BTC the less your expected value will return)?
... I guess deceptive if you don't point out the small cost to their electrical bill ...
An interesting idea and definitely one for the mathematicians but simply unsustainable and risky and
My work here is dung.
I can't believe /. approved this.
Truly, you have to be kidding. If I'm going to mine it'd be for myself.
Mining isn't free - the cost of mining is actually less than the cost of electricity on normal desktop machines (otherwise everyone would be doing it already).
I have only so much extra CPU and GP power and I donate all of it to cancer research, so I don't have any left to give to parasites.
The new ASIC miners coming out will make GPU mining pointless, CPU mining already is. http://www.butterflylabs.com/
mnewberg.com
You know, for certain causes?
Perhaps the question should be whether or not consumers would be willing to pay for an application through mining for the developer. I could see that as preferrable to in-app charges or advertisement and various other sneaky ways game devs have tried to hide the way the real ammount they want consumers to pay for things.
I guess it depends on how much control people have.
There are software to help calculate scientific researches, and some people wouldn't mind. If the code can be alternate or save personal preferences, maybe some people can help spreading the P2P service (more than Bitcoin). Future of the Cloud?
No. If you want to make money (in whatever currency) for your programs, then charge money for your programs --- don't be a douchebag who preys on customers' vulnerability to not accurately counting hidden costs of your schemes. You think your customers would benefit from using their computer time to mine Bitcoin? Then provide them with a handy bitcoin-mining app that they can control, and accept bitcoins as payment for your products.
I have core i7 laptop w/o a gpu capable of mining nbitcoins and still am not able to mine anything for myself. how is this app going to figure out what I am running and mine bitcoins ? On the other hand, if I am capable of mining bitcoins on my own (i.e. just for the cost of electricity and an app developer is asking me 0.01 bitcoins for a mundane app, I wouldn't think as much as I think spending my hard earned $2 real money for that app. Same idea with pay pal. I get incentives for completing some surveys of real value to me (not survey farms) in the order of few dollars a month. And I can spend that money with less worry, knowing it didn't cost me anything other than few minutes of my spare time to get it.
So the premise is exciting but mechanics of it is still a bit unclear to me.
__________
The more I know people, the more I love animals
Why would I let a company use my hardware and electricity to mine for BitCoins and not get anything of out? They sure as hell won't drop the price of the software, nor will I get some sort of kickback that is worth anything. If there is no incentive in it for me to get a part of the profit, then why should I?
First, how effective will the users' computers be at mining? The ESEA one worked because their users were hardcore gamers, who are more likely to have powerful GPUs which can mine effectively. You're planning an "app", which implies "smartphone app", which is not going to have nearly enough power to get *any* amount of money. Even with just standard desktops, you're unlikely to get anything. A lot of people *with* powerful GPUs are getting out of the game, because ASICs are making them less effective.
Second, lets look at the effects. A computer mining Bitcoins is *loud*. It's running under full load, and the fans are pretty much pegged at 80-100%. And they also spit out a lot of heat. And so on. I wouldn't like my computer running like that.
Third, how are you going to explain that to users? If they're smart enough to understand Bitcoin, they'll already either be mining, or have decided that they don't want to mine. Your app won't change their mind. As for the other 99% of humanity, how are you going to tell them "you can run this app for free, but for 5hr a week we take over your computer to do stuff" without them calling the FBI? I'm exaggerating, of course, but you are going to have trouble convincing regular users to do this.
That being said, assuming that it's only mining when I'm actively engaged in the application(to not waste excessive amounts of electricity), I'd approve of this as a replacement to ads. The only downside in comparison to ads is using more power(ie, less battery life in mobile).
Also, this is assuming we have smart and pleasant miners that don't peg CPU/GPU to 100% and cause my computer to crawl, but rather target 80% or less resource utilization. And, of course, not mining in the background. Only mining when I'm actively engaging with the application.
There was a company that already tried to do this with games, they got some VC money and then ran into the dirt. At this point the vast majority of user hardware is all but useless for mining. This would have worked a couple of years ago, but not now.
Most users would be mining on CPU power, and that means very poor chance to get any results while wasting enormous amounts of electricity.
You should look at the Mining hardware comparison. Summarizing: Best Xeon setups get 66Mhash/s and most common desktop setups go 1-10Mhash/s
Meanwhile, FPGA mining devices reach 1000-10,000Mhash/s and ASIC ones get order of 10,000-60,000 at powers like 600W.
Now to get power comparable to a single ASIC rig you'd need roughly 1000 customers running 24/7 or 33,000 customers running 5h a week.
33,000 CPUs running at full power, zero energy saving, to produce results comparable with a 600W appliance. This is to stay moderately competetive and get *some* ROI.
While the cost is distributed between the customers, the real cost - the amount of energy wasted - is staggering.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Just in case you missed this in other posts
My i5-2400 = 12 MH/s bitcoin mining speed @ 95W approx
My old overclocked Radeon 5830 graphics card = 220MH/s @ 200W approx
The new Jalapeno ASIC miner = 4,500+ MH/s @ 2W
The anticipated difficulty raising on mining due to the new cards is estimated at at least 27x so that means you could run the app 24/7 and likely make less than $0.01/day on the average computer while using a hell of a lot more than that in electricity (closer to $0.50 typically).
Define "sneaking it in". If that means not mentioning it at all, then fuck off. In fact, wouldn't that constitute (I forget the exact wording) unauthorized use of a computing resource, which is a felony?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This isn't like the days when ramping up a Pentium 3 to full power meant an extra 20 watts. These days, the difference between idle and balls-out on my gaming rig is hundreds of watts. Eventually, the AC will kick in to keep the room comfortable. Even at idle, it's a pig. I don't run that thing unless I'm playing games. Or if it's a cold night and I want the waste heat to warm the room.
But then again, I'm a "freetard", and I don't pay for software generally anyway. (Though I did spend $20 on a game the other week, and got a good deal I think, no DRM, no hassle.)
Here's the thing, if it's made very very clear, that part of the 'price' for having the app was the it would do a little mining on the side, then it's possible. But, it'd better be an exceptional app. Considering I have never bought productivity software (Linux, Star/Open/LibreOffice, GIMP, and many others) I'm probably not about to start now. If your app is just another game, I'll probably never pay for it, let alone play it. I generally don't play games. (The game I did buy the other week was from Spiderweb Software, who do produce rather good games, that I've played without paying for before, so I thought I should pay for this one.)
Here's the other thing, my computer doesn't have a GPU (I can mine bitcoins at around 4M hashes/second), you'll not make much off me. And, if I wanted to be generally annoying, I could just limit your program, so that you never get any CPU time (unless I actually want to use it).
A better idea: either go Free (or free, if you must) or go shareware/demoware. But tricks like this, it won't work.
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
BitCoin is a nice geek idea, and like all nice geek ideas, fails incredibly in actual practice.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
It would certainly be cheaper for me to pay you the money you'd be making from that mining than paying my electricity provider more than you make from that mining. I don't feel like subsidizing my electricity provider.
All that's of course assuming your program is worth the cost to me.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
It's not a stupid idea, even if a lot of commentators on here can't see past their hatred of anyone requiring anything from them. It has been shown time and again that people don't like paying, even pennies, up front for something but are happy to hand over things worth far more (personal information, viewing time etc) after they have become users. Even though theoretically it would cost them more to provide computing time for bitcoins than just pay you there are many people who won't pay but wouldn't care about compute time (electric costs etc) and no personal details would need to be exchanged.
All that said, it just isn't worth it. The amount you can mine would be comparatively limited and is getting lower as mining kit becomes more advanced; additionally you'd have to handle any issues this causes for users, have people claiming you're stealing and bad press (like here) and the value will continue to fall. Additionally as phones and tablets become more popular the average resources available to mine with have shrunk as well.
I will pay for CS6 on my WORK computer this way
And what law entitles the makers of the app to ownership of bitcoins yielded by mining in excess of what the user agreed to?
Why would I run their app while my computer is idle? Why would I not turn it off, hibernate it or put it in standby?
Why would I want them to burn through 1kWh per week of my power bill? (assuming 200W at 100% CPU/GPU for 5 hours) That's about $15 per year.
If you want bitcoins I suppose it would be much more efficient to ask your users to pay you in bitcoins for your app. If your app is widely spread enough and good enough, and even if only one percent of your users pay, it would most likely be much more than what you could mine.
What do you think about this?
I'm going to go with "Hell no, with a side of fuck you."
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Stop it with the Bitcoin articles. We're not interested in your Ponzi scheme.
Rob
If you're going to drop cash, why do it indirectly through your electric bill? Just drop the app a buck or two!
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
It's not stealing if you ask and they say "yes". That's called a business agreement.
In 2008, there was a bit of a stink raised when chat client Digsby implemented a "Research Module" that used local CPU resources while the machine was not active. Their blog post announcing the fact was in 2008, and I'm not sure that they ever removed this functionality.
It was reason enough for me to force anyone I knew to uninstall the tool - I'm not keen on subscriptions, especially fluctuating cost ones.
It could be a good source of revenue as along as the author is up front about it to the users and the users agree to it. It could be used as a means of donation to projects.
Maybe they could calculate how many shares to submit per month given a certain PPS or PPLNS rate on a pool and crank those out one night then be good to go the rest of the month. It doesn't occur to me that this type of thing has to be a "burn up your computer to make someone some money."
...that is already on your Windows box?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
you assume that network access is not implicitely needed for other app to function.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
GPUs are no longer cost efficient for mining bitcoins, in terms of marginal electricity cost(1). Therefore, it cannot be cost efficient for a person to run the bitcoin mining software on their home machine. Given that it cannot be a cost efficient use of the user's electricity, it is not possible for the user to be engaging in an informed, consensual transaction(2)(3). Transactions without informed consent are market distortions, reduce GDP in the long run, and are not ethical.
1. That may not be strictly true, right now, with the sudden rise in bitcoin price and the lag in bringing new specialized hardware online, but any such brief market distortin resulting in cost efficiency will be optimized away quickly.
2. Except for the possibility that the transaction cost of the user directly paying the software provider is enough to make it inefficient to pay directly, but still efficient to pay for more electricity (a transaction that is already happening, so the transaction cost is sunk) and give the discounted proceeds to the software provider.
3. Or if the user also gets satisfaction from the very act of running the bitcoin mining client, because he or she believes it is worth the personal cost for the social good of helping to process bitcoin transactions.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
What if I "accept" this extra little dose of malware that will mine bitcoins for the company whose service I use and then use some other software or technique to block my computer from mining bitcoins? Will I have to promise to keep my machine running during off-hours? Will I have to deliver a certain level of bitcoin mining service?
Will this become the new model for consumer purchases? When you buy some good or service, will you now work for the company who sold it to you?
I've tried to think of some way our current top down, corporatist system could become more odious, and we may have found it.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I'm not sure quite what you're trying to clarify here? If you want to make more money than you currently charge, then charge more than you currently charge. A scheme like the bitcoin mining plan is just an underhanded way to (probably grossly inefficiently) suck money from your customers' inability to calculate the actual costs of the "free" deal. As noted in SharpFang's post below, most customers running on normal hardware will probably be mining bitcoin at a steep loss --- paying much more in energy, both for the computer and air conditioning to remove the excess heat --- than the bitcoins are even worth. Trying to scrape a bit of extra profit with large hidden costs to the customer might be a successful marketing plan, but you're an asshole for doing it. Just be up-front about what you charge; and, if you honestly think your customers would benefit from some better use of their computer's idle time, then give them separate tools to allow them to make that choice for themselves (educated with all the necessary information) --- don't make those choices for them just to pad your bottom line.
it will be 'installed' just like every other virus/malware with small print in the user agreement that your computer becomes crap after agreeing to install this program.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
Evidently, upon reading the above, Bitcoins were created by the power company since they profit the most from the whole process.
I am not sure I like the idea of money "just appearing" in ones pocket because you happen to have more computing power than anyone else to mine bit coins.
Pray tell, just who currently does that happen to be?
NSA
CIA
Pentagon
Wall Street
Federal Reserve
All of the above have the most computing power for bitcoin mining.
No thanks to Bitcoin.
The entire idea of a currency is that it is suppose to be the holder of intrinsic value, and cannot be meddled with by any single entity to gain an advantage in trade.
Historically, that means Gold and Silver, contrary to what your government tells you, Gold and Silver are the only real money of historic note.
Here are some ways to get more silver and gold:
1) Mine for it.
2) Destroy whole countries and take it.
3) Tax the people into starvation.
***4) Actually perform real work and be productive and trade it for goods and services.
Banks hate all 4, especially 4 because healthy economies mean fewer people have to borrow and they would much rather do 2 because afterwards countries go into debt to rebuild but the risk is, you could end up getting your head chopped off.
As everyone here knows, bankers do not like risk, and want the sure thing.
So today, bankers like fiat currency. They love it. They can enter a number in a computer, and do absolutely no work for any of the money because the society which uses it must accept it to live and work.
So with today's fiat currencies, bankers have access to vast armies of slaves. This only works of course, if everyone doesn't see the man behind the curtain, printing money like mad for himself and his cronies. Today, that mostly means politicians and technocrats.
You can see this happening in Europe right now, as countries are falling into a economic dictatorship with whole societies collapsing and the bankers ripping off people in broad daylight.
So far, people over there seem to be OK with it in Greece and Cyprus. So, expect the bankers to move on to other countries and do the same.
But besides this mischief, I think people just want a currency which is fair, and that is not a fiat currency where elite people can just print money and live a life of luxury.
So alternative currencies are being explored.
Gold and Silver though, is very hard to manipulate. It can be done, but it is very hard to do and maintain control over it as you can't print it and its value cannot be made equal to zero....
Unless of course everyone is dead and with the way these bankers are out of control, it may very well come to that if the Federal Reserve and its cronies at the IMF, IBofS are not stopped.
I mean we have France invading Mali right now because Germany wants it Gold back. I don't mean a gold coin, I mean, France owes Germany TONS and TONS and TONS of Gold.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
If it was still economical, yes I would pay the increased electricity bill if I felt it was worth it... but it's not.
A blog I run for the wealth
It's only theft if it not part of the contract. Just as it is not theft if the cashier demands that you give him money for the goods you got from the store.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
No.
No thank you very much.
Not at all.
I get access to, say, a paywalled site, for allowing their client X hours of CPU time a month. Or perhaps X GFLOPS per month.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Perhaps you don't... but perhaps if you could exchange your CPU time for (example) free shiping on Newegg then I bet your interest would increase.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
1. Install bitcoin mining software on your PC.
2. Run it whenever you aren't using the computer.
3. Profit!!
4. Use the profit to buy whatever game you want.
re: While the cost is distributed between the customers, the real cost - the amount of energy wasted - is staggering.
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But this is where these kinds of tricks work: when the person authorizing the use of these "utilities" is not the one paying them. This kind of disconnect is how the college kids at U.C. Irvine and U.C. San Diego rack up huge credit card bills because mommy and daddy pay for them so the kids don't have to worry about how much they charge. They even use the cards as an "auto ATM": pick up cash from the other student diners and pay for the meal on your/parents' credit card: instant cash in your pocket while the parents just think that the kids had an expensive meal, since momzy and dadzy eat at very expensive restaurants, a chinese restaurant meal for 10 won't even make them blink or question the cost.
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Having health care covered by insurance paid for through work while the covered person doesn't even look at or get to see the bill also leads to the same kind of disconnect: no one tries to minimize cost if the cost burden is not fully borne by them or even made fully known to them. In fact, it's the opposite: look at the people running to spend their health benefits by the end of the fiscal year: they know that if they don't buy those eyeglasses or get the dental cleaning by the end of the year, those benefits just vanish into thin air. This bizarre set up leads to this bizarre behaviour.
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And that's just what will happen at work places or at home for kids: the users of the computers (workers or kids) will okay this cannabilistic/opportunistic software process, while the payer for the electricity consumption (boss/department/company or the parents) won't even see that the overhead costs have jumped up because of this silliness. The costs are lost in the overhead costs' noise!
I'd like to call it hashware. And to add to it, if researchers or governments want supercomputer clusters, why not have hashware like bitcoin that pays the public to perform mathematical computations?
Yeah, I caught that in another reply already. Although that malaria figure has been shown to be massively under-estimated due to a lack of reporting.
However, there's still a way in which malaria is 'bigger' than cancer: there are many different kinds of cancers, not all of which can be fixed using a single mechanism. Each cancer is a separate and distinctive problem as far as medicine is concerned. Malaria, on the other hand, is only caused by a few parasites in one genus, and they cause the same symptoms via the same mechanism. Thus if you contribute to malaria research, your contribution will affect far more people than cancer research.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Has anyone actually sat down and worked out the CO2 conversion rate (I realise theres a tonne of different variables here such as nuke or renwables, gas fired vs coal fired stations) in terms of the power used to create these "coins"?
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
I for one dislike advertisements far more than this, tho some apps I don't think are worth paying for. If I were personally presented with 3 options, pay, free, or mine Bitcoins on a small app, I'd opt the later every time so long as it was clear how it was used. If I'm running a small game and it doesn't disturb the frame rate, I wouldn't mind in the slightest.
-Ultimate Stickman Game Developer Infinite World Puzzler
Hell no!
1. Bitcoin is an unrecognized currency, built on wooly, geek idealism that could get legislated away with the stroke of a pen.
2. Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, but to create these digital puffs of smoke, one has to destroy very real, very costly, finite resources.
3. The proposed method is sleezy. There is no mutual benefit. While the App author gets "his" Bitcoins for the cost of writing and distributing an App, his customers pay through the nose in utility bills and wear and tear on their equipment. This App better have the same impact as Lotus 123 had in the 80's, otherwise this reeks of simple exploitation.
4. Bitcoins are finite and increasingly difficult to mine per the design of the scheme. So as time progresses, fewer and fewer Bitcoins will be uncovered and the resource use to get them will only grow and grow. Is it ethical to agree to use a highly inefficient method to create Bitcoins, while increasing carbon emmissions and burdoning this planet, just so you can use an App "for free" and put a little chump change in the pocket of the developer?
# touch universe # chmod +rwx universe #
2. Except for the possibility that the transaction cost of the user directly paying the software provider is enough to make it inefficient to pay directly, but still efficient to pay for more electricity (a transaction that is already happening, so the transaction cost is sunk) and give the discounted proceeds to the software provider.
You have a point here. For really small transactions, the trouble of paying for something is more than the cost of the money. For a page view of a magazine or something, running your CPU for a few minutes could be a good deal. For stuff like in-game purchases, it could feel like a good deal, but be terribly inefficient in the long run.