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Can The Pirate Bay Replace Ads With A Bitcoin Miner? (betanews.com)
Mark Wilson writes: When it comes to the Pirate Bay, it's usually movie studios, music producers and software creators that get annoyed with the site — you know, copyright and all that. But in an interesting twist it is now users who find themselves irked by and disappointed in the most famous torrent site in the world.
So what's happened? Out of the blue, the Pirate Bay has added a Javascript-powered Bitcoin miner to the site. Nestling in the code of the site is an embedded cryptocurrency miner from Coinhive. Users who have noticed an increase in resource usage on their computers as a result of this are not happy.
TorrentFreak reports the miner is being tested for about 24 hours -- as a possible way to earn enough revenue to remove advertising from the site.
So what's happened? Out of the blue, the Pirate Bay has added a Javascript-powered Bitcoin miner to the site. Nestling in the code of the site is an embedded cryptocurrency miner from Coinhive. Users who have noticed an increase in resource usage on their computers as a result of this are not happy.
TorrentFreak reports the miner is being tested for about 24 hours -- as a possible way to earn enough revenue to remove advertising from the site.
So please note I'm not trolling in any way or shape. But in this particular case, on this particular site, I think it's a great idea.
The Pirate Bay has been sailing strong for all these years, so the money has got to come from somewhere. Any source of donations will be quickly cut off by the establishment, and people donating will have to fear for their anonymity. Ads will probably not be very effective, since the average visitor will probably have an ad blocker.
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This is not a terrible idea, as long as there's some control being exercised (which I'm sure there won't be...) The controls should be: The miner is only active when I'm on the site, it's not installed on my computer, and it's limited to, say, 50% of the available spare CPU cycles. I don't think I'd mind fewer ads (which I don't see anyway) in return for giving the site some of my spare CPU cycles to try to make a few cents.
Best way to stay out of control of others is to not rely on them. This uses distributed means direct from the user to generate a revenue source without having to cater to 3rd parties under gov control. Can't get better than this. I'm sure Google and others who rely on ad revenue will try to ban it as soon as possible though or push out an update under the guise of helping to limit peoples computer usage on websites. That latter part already has happened once and screwed up a lot of apps.
This is just the start. Web sites are already ruining older and slower computers with unnecessary animation, auto-scrolling, video, huge photo resizing locally, etc, etc. They totally zap precious battery life on mobile devices. They decimate any type of multiuser machines. They gobble data needlessly for those on metered or limited connections.
I am not opposed to mining in the browser as a concept, but I am opposed to it being done without the user having some reasonable control over resources. This is a bad trend that could evolve into something much worse.
Browsers need to give users more control over CPU usage, more control to place limits, to identify tight loops and auto-throttle, etc.
Software miners are 10 to 100 times less efficient that ASIC miners. Since this is in JS, and no browsers currently run WebCL by default, this is likely at the high end of that range. So for every $1 that TPB collects, they may be wasting $100 of electricity that their users are paying for.
This is unethical and environmentally irresponsible. Alas, even pirates can no longer be trusted.
This is what I was going to say. I'm happy if the web is free, and my computer works to pay for it. I don't need to work, and I don't need to look at ads and be convinced to buy products. Instead my computer just works for the site owners for a few minutes.
This is the direct equivalent of not being able to pay a restaurant check, and "washing dishes" instead.
It's the perfect future. Offer a service for free, and get paid by your "customers'" computers instead. What a perfectly-direct and causal relationship between popularity and profit. Imagine if twitter got a penny-worth of profit from each user-minute.
In theory, sure. But in practice, I can buy a better computer, I can buy a quieter computer, I can keep it in the next room. And yeah, I can pay for everything via my electrical bill. Ok. Instead paying for things with money, I can pay with electricity -- sounds like the future to me.