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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.
You could expect tech news site to know the difference between different crypto coins. No matter if you try to mine Bitcoin on millions of computers you will not get any, only dedicated data centers with thousands of ASICs can reach the hashing power needed.
Monero, like some other altcoins, can be mined on CPUs and/or GPUs.
it's in my head
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.
_Anything_ is better than ads.
this doesn't hurt the eyes, the ears nor the brain and modern processors have lots of power to share.
Yea, they likely get a significant amount traffic per day considering they serve the entire planet essentially.
Assume each user spends 5 min on the site looking through the list of torrents that best match their search.
That compute power can really add up especially if your using it to replace revenue you would get from ads.
Honestly I don't see any issue with it as long as it's disclosed. In fact I wouldn't have a problem with most websites using it provided it was opt in. Then I could turn my adblock back on for some sites I like while still contributing to their revenue.
It would also be pretty cool if sites like Netflix added something like this and offered profit sharing on it for the user. 50/50 split on profit and you can turn it off and on easily from any page on the site. Same for YouTube. We mostly watch YouTube and Netflix, I wouldn't mind making some money off that while they use some of my PC's resources. The trick would be limiting how much power it uses so the user never loses money and also so it never causes your PC to increase any fan curves more than say 10%.
Sure I could mine myself but I honestly don't care enough about it. Having someone else set it all up and do the work for me then all I do is use my PC like normal...sounds fine by me.
Like they, or any website, are going to say, "Hey, this is enough money per month. Let's just stop here". Yeah, right.
Last night my PC's fans maxed out, and it was easy to pin the CPU usage on a couple of TPB tabs.
I have an exception for TPB.org on UBlock, and I'd much rather load ads (just no pop-ups, please) than fill my room with heat and noise.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
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.
Nothing derers a person from doing what they really want to do. Some people just have a death wish.
Example: Watch the latest Star Wars for as long as you are mining bitcoins for them.
For that matter, could YouTube get rid of its advertising in exchange for bitcoin mining power?
You can't expect the internet to be full of good content unless people get paid somehow... frankly, the advertising has gotten out of control to the point that I feel no guilt using an adblocker on every site. However, I'm perfectly happy to contribute spare CPU cycles within reason. However, this is a very slippery slope. I typically have 10+ tabs open at any given time. I can easily see this getting abused. In my tests TPB was using about 15% CPU on each of my 16 threads (Ryzen 1800X), so all together it was using just over an entire core, or two threads, but distributed over all threads makes it unnoticeable to anyone with a decent CPU.
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.
and my computer works to pay for it.
And then you work for the money to pay your electrical bill with.
That, and a working computer is a hot and noisy computer. Fuck that.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
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.
JavaScript doesn't work that way. JavaScript runs in a very restricted security environment. It can do math, it can interact with the user, it can communicate with the website it came from. It can't spam the world without sending it all through the server it came from, which would defeat the purpose.
Check out the Apostrophe open-source CMS: http://www.apostrophenow.com/