Slashdot Mirror
Could Cryptocurrency Mining Kill Online Advertising? (linkedin.com)
"Could it turn out users actually prefer to trade a little CPU time to website owners in favor of them not showing ads?" writes phonewebcam, a long-time Slashdot reader.
Slashdot covered the downside [of in-browser cryptocurrency mining] recently, with even [Portuguese professional sportsballer] Cristiano Ronaldo's official site falling victim, but that may not be the full story. This could be an ideal win-win situation, except for one huge downside -- the current gang of online advertisers.
By "current gang of online advertisers," he means Google, according to a longer essay at LinkedIn: Naturally, the world's largest ad broker, which runs the world most popular browser (desktop and mobile) is keen to see how this plays out, and is also uniquely placed to be able to heavily influence it, too... As it happens, Chrome users can already do something about it via extensions, for example AntiMiner... If cryptocurrencies have a future - and that's a big if (look at China's Bitcoin ban) - it could well turn out that their role just took an unexpected turn.
By "current gang of online advertisers," he means Google, according to a longer essay at LinkedIn: Naturally, the world's largest ad broker, which runs the world most popular browser (desktop and mobile) is keen to see how this plays out, and is also uniquely placed to be able to heavily influence it, too... As it happens, Chrome users can already do something about it via extensions, for example AntiMiner... If cryptocurrencies have a future - and that's a big if (look at China's Bitcoin ban) - it could well turn out that their role just took an unexpected turn.
You couldn't kill online advertising if you nuked it from orbit.
Beware of the Leopard.
(eom)
WHich is why Google is making its browser combat it.
I would love to be able to use this to pay websites if that meant either better content or less adverts. If my computer is a 100 watt computer then even going full blast for 10 hours it would be worth ten cents of electricity. (And since I heat my home with electricity actually no cost at all in winter).
While it's a horribly inefficient way to make a micropayment to a wed site, all micropayment systems tend to be very inefficient. So it's just one possible way to do micropayments.
And if I find it's tying up my computer then I just leave the web site.
The thing that might turn out nice here is that perhaps it will become a true stepping stone to a micropayment based low-advertising low-tracking world. Right now everyone avoids pay sites cause there's free stuff out there somewhere. But the real reason is I don't really want to limit my self to a few sites, so I can't just subscribe. One could imagine that there might be a way for sites to band together in the millions as collectives. I then pay $100 a year to the collective. The sites then get micropayments from the collective as their use meters. That I'd do.
But to get there we need to get the idea that you are always paying for the site. whther it's ads, tracking, selling your data, patreon, or subscriptions. you pay. We just need a better micropayment system to make it all homogeneous.
this might be a step in that direction.
google should be afraid.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
But it wont - becuase it's not "ads vs cryptomining", it "ads and cryptomining"...
Hold on, let me check my memory.
Physical Memory: 93.65%
All I have open is a browser browsing Slashdot.
How do you expect me to mine coins in the background?
Advertising is a plague, but that's not the real problem: the real problem is that you can monetize users by showing them garbage, and then you won't believe what happens next: the garbage pushes out the good stuff so it's hard to find.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
>"Could it turn out users actually prefer to trade a little CPU time to website owners in favor of them not showing ads?"
No. And for a variety of reasons:
1) If it can be done, it will....
2) Which means they will BOTH show ads AND attempt to mine.
3) Browsers and plugins WILL give us control over this. Hopefully sooner than later.
4) Once people realize it is destroying their batteries, eating up electricity, slowing down their systems, creating heat, and kicking on louder fans, there will be a backlash.
5) I doubt there is enough money in mining, especially once people start blocking it.
Whatever the future of these currencies, mining is drying up fast, so no. Also buy a cheap electricity meter and check out what hashing does to your power bill. You may think twice about wanting to have your processor running full tilt for sixteen hours a day. Throwing an extra two hundred dollars a year at your local coal plant is a pretty damn stupid way to support websites you like. Use blockers and donate to those sites you couldn't bear to be without.
Won't happen. Waste of opportunity. I may not have a degree in economics, but without a cultural/social effect, there's simply no way money will be left on the table. The most direct scenario being porque_no_los_dos?.gif
Greed will make them mine cryptocurrencies and show ads in order to get even more money.
I think so and I hope so. Also, that's why Google is actively trying to kill it: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/10/19/1618222/google-engineers-explore-ways-to-stop-in-browser-cryptocurrency-miners-in-chrome
Given that users have already had a frightful response when this has been rolled out on a number of websites recently, why does anyone think this would be a good idea?
Is there some special kind of user that you haven't already pissed off with it?
What's a few million general purpose CPUs with no access to advanced instructions or GPUs compared to a rack of custom ASICs? How is this anything but a passing fad with rapidly diminishing returns?
I don't see why leveraging client CPU cycles for cryptocurrencies obviates traditional ad income; they're not mutually exclusive, after all. Sure, some websites may initially declare that they're crypto-only, but once it becomes evident that people will tolerate ads as well as lending their CPUs toward mining, the ads will come rolling back. Just like subscription services inevitably pursue advertising (ex. cable/satellite/etc.), websites with distributed client-side mining will too.
"Is not a sentence" is not a sentence. Well damn.
Mining using javascript is (depending on the coin) at best a 1000 to 1 cost to benefit. For bit coin it would cost between 10 million to 100 million in electricity to mine one coin. Golem might give you a better than 1000 to one cost but it will have other problems. If javascript could access your graphics card maybe you could mine one of the currencies that is optimized for graphics cards.
Realistically, running flat out my CPU is going to mine less than $5 per year. The only way I could make money on this is if I trick millions of people to mine for a me for a number of months.
From a pure economical perspective, simply no.
specialized APU's or GPU rigs will always be magnitudes more efficient than some JS script running in a browser instance.
so you end up letting 10.000 people pay the same amount in electricity that 1 person could achieve with his specialized rig. The price of electricity and hardware is the limiting factor in coin generation.
So , is my rig chums along for a year and produces a whole dollar worth of coins, others will have spend 10.000 dollar on electricity, to produce that one dollar.
For now it seems like "free money" for the site operator, it is not his electricity bill, but others are, and will soon realize the idiocy in this scheme.
Why are other peoples sig's always more witty ???
It makes no sense financially, and on the odd chance that the few seconds a user has a page open + the overhead of sending the start of work and end of work back + the horrendous inefficiency of the CPU this will never make financial sense.
Plus users will be very quickly to throttle and block this in our brave new laptop / tablet world. Users may not care if their computers are slow but they will be very quick to react when their battery life is decimated.
Browser crypto mining kills my PC performance. Ads do not. I prefer ads for that reason.
I love how this keeps coming up as if crypto-mining is going to happen INSTEAD OF advertising. Kind of like how cable came about and you would pay for the service instead of having commercials. Sure, maybe some advertising goes away at first. But it will come back as bad as ever.
> This could be an ideal win-win situation
Except that it wastes huge amounts of energy. Mining for cryptocoins by running a huge number of CPUs or ASICs at full power is the equivalent of getting millions of people enlessly recite the alchemical mantra. No gold will be created however and those cycles or words just disappear into thin air.
On the other hand, the electrical energy used to power the chips is necessarily produced by polluting the natural environment. Even if you shun coal, oil or nuclear, the hydro plants and wind turbines must be produced in factories, transported and erected at a great effort. In that regard, Bitcoin is worse than the tulip craze was as that one didn't pollute the environment.
...the only thing crypto currency would turn out to be good for then.
The biggest site, Pirate Bay, makes about $12.000 per month from visitor mining, a blog with 300.000 visits would make about $ 4 per month ... thatâs no match for online advertising
I'd like to interject that in this context you can often be even more efficient (in the goal-oriented sense) by using the same amount of energy at a different task, that of pumping heat inwards from the outdoors.
that if they allow background processes for bitmining, then they can run some distributed program which splits up the revenue of mining with the various node runners.
Mining only, a website makes $X,
with ads and mining, a website makes $X+$Y.
No, online ads are not going anywhere.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I love how this keeps coming up as if crypto-mining is going to happen INSTEAD OF advertising. Kind of like how cable came about and you would pay for the service instead of having commercials. Sure, maybe some advertising goes away at first. But it will come back as bad as ever.
I can't help but wonder if they won't make it so that in order to view the CONTENT of the webpage, the crypto miner loads and must being running, and start cranking out results, in order for the page to load the ADS, which in turn must be visible for some number of seconds BEFORE the page itself, the content that was the reason for navigating to the site, actually loads, thus giving MORE time for the miner to run, ensuring you haven't blocked it, AND making sure they got their money's worth.
If I were an evil programming genius/business-criminal, that's how I would do it. I'd make my page start nice and clean, display a banner with an ad, and have a text-box below that requires you to type one of the following things: the name of the company the ad is FOR, the name of the product being advertised, or something else that could only be entered demonstrating that the user has seen and understands the ad.
Thankfully, I don't have my own website.
Actually, that gives me an idea. You know the CAPTCHAs that require you to click on all the boxes with a street sign in them, or each one with a bird in it? What if they did that with ADS? Like, in order to view the website you're trying to get to, you must click each box with a corporate logo in it, or click each box with a food item in it.
They could even go really nuts with this. I can envision a world in which advertisers use picking their products as gatekeepers. Like for example: the ad shows a couple people enjoying lunch at a food court at a mall. One of them is eating food from McRonald's, and another from Meat-Sandwich Prince, and the ad requires users to click on "the box containing the freshest, most delicious hamburger," and if you click on the one from the sponsor, it lets you through to the site, and if you click on the other, it takes you to a page of search results featuring their competitor's name or the names of flagship products, like "the Whipper," and words like "diarrhea," "food-borne-illness," and "lawsuit".
I agree with you, it'll most likely be all-of-the-above, until we fix the rules and laws underpinning our economic system so that having the most profitable company doesn't get you the greatest rewards, but so that the rewards of being innovative and/or industrious and managing things well are tempered with how the company behaves, vis-a-vis protecting customer privacy, data, and the environment that their customers (and the people in general) have to live in.
But I digress. It'll be ads AND crypto-mining, AND reporting on your location, in addition to your browsing history, the contents of your messages, all the data that can be pinned to you via Internet of Things devices, etc.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
Really? So how do you block a mining script that's served from the same domain as the website you're visiting, using a hosts file?
What if an ISP, CC and ad .coms want to stop working with a site after political/gov/mil/sjw/other gov "requests".
A method for a site to ask supporters for direct support would remove some of the political gatekeeping.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
if you don't want to adblock or block scripts;
a userscript can probably be made pretty easily to neuter the crypto mining javascripts so it essentially doesn't mine anything but reports back it is working (noscript might be able to do this too, as it does similar types of replacements for some others)..
or at least slow it the fuck down to 1 thread at 1% cpu or something (there's a api for that right in the mining script).
Advertising has become the dominant form of paying for online content, and it has lead to the mess we are in.
- Profiling - "surveillance is the businessmodel of the internet" as Bruce Schneier puts it.
- Fake news is the result of a 'race to the bottom' for attention by news services.
We badly need alternatives to advertising for paying for online things.
Personally I feel we really need micro transactions built into the browser / HTML6. Paying with money instead of data is the inevitable future if we want to protect our privacy. But until that time I think crypto mining is a creative stop-gap.
And then the thought occurred to them, "Why not mine bitcoins in your browser AND display shitty, malware-laden ads too?" ...and every advertising executive instantly came in his or her pants simultaneously.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
See subject & APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-7 32/64-bit https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=&bih=&q=%22APK+Hosts+File+Engine%22+and+%22start64%22&btnG=Google+Search&gbv=1/
Ads/script/malware rob speed/security/privacy/bandwidth.
Hosts add speed (via hardcodes/adblocks), security (vs. bad sites/malware/poisoned dns), reliability (vs. dns down), & anonymity (vs. dns requestlogs/trackers).
Less power/cpu/ram + IO use vs. DNS/routers/addons/antivirus + less security bugs/complexity & faster vs. addons/routers/remote dns!
Avoids DNSChangers in routers/IP settings & dns redirect (99.999% of ISP DNS != patched vs. it) + DNS tracking & lighten DNS load & resolve faster from local RAM!
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APK
P.S. - Safe https://www.virustotal.com/en/file/e01211ca36aa02e923f20adee0a3c4f5d5187dc65bdf1c997b3da3c2b0745425/analysis/1433430542/ (self checking code vs. infection of program built-in it)
What if I don't want to use Opera? How will your Hosts File Engine block mining scripts served from the same domain as the website I am visiting?
I do "nuke it from orbit" (kernelmode) before it hits browser (in usermode) via https://tech.slashdot.org/comm... [slashdot.org]
* BOTH ads & cryptocurrency mining scripts + a hell of a lot more in malware of many kinds!
("Can't beat it with a stick" & neither can other "so-called 'solutions'" that eat TONS more resources, are overly complex OR exploitable themselves doing FAR less yet consuming FAR more (doing less vs. hosts))
APK
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No we don't like cryptomining instead of ads.. I'd rather have ads which don't cost me a thing then having something run in the background eating up my resources even more.. And where does it end.
I'll never use them but I for one welcome our webworking cryptomining pyramidscheming overlords.
And that is all there is to say on the subject. (Like there always is when its a "could?" post)
I thought about this before. If you look at the cost of hiring a renderfarm, you're looking at a few cents per core-hour. This was a few seconds of googling. I presume there are companies that will sell generic number crunching by the CPU-hour at a similar cost. But if you're mining commercially you'd presumably find it cheaper to have your own farm than lease one.
How much CPU time are people willing to give for a page? They're only willing to handle reduced utility for the time spent looking at a page; for a few minutes at most. they're not going to want their entire PC, and certainly not their entire phone's CPU dedicated to running the app.
Throw in the additional overhead of javascript and you're getting a tiny fraction of a cent worth of CPU power.
I've never really taken this crypto-currency thing serious but this particular article grabbed my attention and I found CoinHive's website and within a few minutes I set up a crypto-currency minor on one of my ground snow load maps to test the concept: http://design.medeek.com/resou... (note that you have to click on the map at least five times before the daily allowance of lookups is exceeded and then the notice for the crypto miner is displayed). After mucking around with it a bit and letting it run for a couple of hours as well as checking my CoinHive balance (XMR) a few things jumped out at me: 1.) This sort of thing is very simple to implement, a minor amount of javascript, so we may see a surge in this type of micro-payments. 2.) The surge in CPU usage is annoying however the website can ramp the actual usage down to a lower level so that it is less of an annoyance, I set my coinhive miner to throttle back 60% so as not to grab too many CPU cycles. 3.) The only way this is actually going to work is if the website visitor is literally spending hours on a particular website/page. 4.) Harvesting or mining crypto-currency is a very inefficient way of generating income, the whole of idea of running all of these hash calculations seems like a vast waste of time and energy. In the real world the production of good and services (useful) is what generates income. Crypto-currency just doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me in that regard, maybe someone can explain it rationally to me. 5.) Ads or CPU utilization, pick your poison. I still prefer a micro-payment via paypal or credit card, but people hate paying for things directly. My conclusion is that there are probably better methods to obtain micro-payments, I am fully expecting this sort of thing to evolve further in the next few months and ultimately internet ads may go the way of the dinosaurs.
Pros recommend hosts for blocking out domains doing crypto mining and what they talk to/from with "use this classic Windows hosts trick to block the Coinhive or Crypto-Loot domains at the OS level" - https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/a-new-player-joins-coinhive-on-the-browser-cryptojacking-scene/ BLEEPING COMPUTER
&
"best option right now is to block known Bitcoin mining domains. One of the better options to do that is to add these to the hosts file of the operating system so that these domains redirect to localhost" https://www.ghacks.net/2017/09/22/how-to-block-bitcoin-mining-in-your-browser/ Martin Brinkman - GHacks
* Any site serving it directly STILL TALKS TO THE BITCOIN MINING SERVERS but again as I said before I'd block that site right off totally & never visit it again as there is always a substitute alternate one doing the same basic thing.
APK
P.S.=> See subject... apk
No! Automated mining on my machine is not what I want at all. So every work computer we have will be running mining software because they just visit web sites at lunch and then the rest of the time it will slow the machine down so that people complain their computers are not working.. No I would not want that.
The only way this would work is if people got extra dedicated hardware that was put in the machine, like a mining card.
And it's sole purpose was to run a little bit at some request, but then why stop at advertisers, why not let games use it to mine so they can make money, or other apps or even the government to reduce the debt?
How about letting our cars mine when we drive or all of our IoT devices?
I'm joking, I don't want things to take control of my devices for any reason.
DNS is loaded w/ bugs https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=9007355&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=51969075/ e.g. 99++% aren't patched vs. Kaminsky redirect security flaw ALONE!
* ... & that link is FAR from complete!
LIKE I SAID TOO MANY TIMES ABOVE?
A site runs cryptomining scripts?? I BLOCK THEM OFF PERMANENTLY in hosts & find an alternate providing the same basic information (there's always those) - see, if they are willing to "sneak those in" on users, what ELSE would they do? Think about it.
Then, as I said of Opera earlier? I can set BySITE prefs to allow script (while all others are globally set to NOT use script).
APK
P.S.=> You guys & your MOVING GOALPOST "theoreticals" aren't even REAL - pure imaginary bullshit, makes me laugh @ you... apk
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One could imagine that there might be a way for sites to band together in the millions as collectives. I then pay $100 a year to the collective. The sites then get micropayments from the collective as their use meters.
You just described the exact business model of a late 1990s multi-site subscription collective known as Adult Check. But what ultimately took Adult Check down was that too many sites that accepted Adult Check displayed photos taken from Perfect 10 magazine without permission.
So why don't websites cut out the middleman and allow advertisers to buy ad placements directly from them? That'd also allay fears of cross-site tracking.
if extra heat is doing work, then application efficiency approaches 100% because most waste is heat!
Unless you happen to live in a market whose local natural gas company is willing to sell you energy at a lower price per joule than the local electric company. That may not the case where DontBeAMoran lives, but it's the case where other people live.
Well, calculate the power needs of 1000 miles of ducting and air pumps and let me know if it is really the same amount of energy.
It seems the resistive load will win, and digital logic seems an easy way to get extra work out of a resistive load. Especially for home use, because digital bits are easy to store. In a factory, there are a lot more choices.
Hosts protect where addons can't (or as well):
Bad sites (past ads)
Botnet C&Cs
DNS down or poisoned
Trackers (dns logs/ads/transparent ISP proxy)
Dns blocks
Spam/phish payload
Slowdown 2 ways: adblocks & hardcodes
Hosts = Ez edit.
AB+ 151mb https://www.google.com/search?q=Adblock+memory+consumption&btnG=Search&hl=en&gbv=1/
UBlock 64MB https://www.google.com/search?q=UBlock+memory+consumption&btnG=Search&hl=en&gbv=1/
Hosts~16mb
Addons = ClarityRay defeatable & crippled http://www.businessinsider.com/google-microsoft-amazon-taboola-pay-adblock-plus-to-stop-blocking-their-ads-2015-2/
NoScript tag parses. Hosts block script prior to it!
No 1 addon does as much.
Stacked addons slowup.
ADDONS = EXPLOITABLE https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11166303&cid=55266729/
APK
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For places that don't get all that cold (say, rarely below -10C) the heat pump is more efficient than resistive heating. There doesn't need to be much ducting, just an intake and an exhaust port and some way to distribute warm air connected to the heat pump. I've got a portable one in my dining room (usually used as an air conditioner) that sits next to a window, has intake and exhaust that can be inside the window, and sends the air out its front.
Where I live, it gets pretty cold, so houses around here burn natural gas for heat. This is more efficient than burning it at the power plant, making electricity, and sending it to us so we can run it through resistors.
For most cases, resistive heat is significantly less efficient than the alternatives.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
You're conflating a "heat pump," which only have utility here if used as an engineering jargon term, with the common English words used above in "pumping heat inwards from the outdoors." A heat pump such as an air conditioner is not going to pump heat inwards from the outdoors when it is 0C outside. That isn't how they work. They generate net heat through resistive elements, and use it to move a smaller amount of heat. The cooling you'd generate outside would be the result of heat pump action, but most of the heating generated inside would be from the resistive elements within the machine. It is never going to be more efficient than just running the same electricity through a resistor with the whole device inside the dwelling.
Stop talking about burning natural gas, you didn't do any of the analysis to compare it to electricity. Talking about those oranges is just stupid unless you're going to talk the time to actually compare it. An electric heater 100% of the heat stays inside. Burning natural gas you have to vent the exhaust. You can't capture and use very much of the heat generated, because of fumes. Get a clue. Your application efficiency is crap, and you're only talking about natural gas because of your politics.
I agree that a gas furnace's efficiency isn't 100 percent. But its efficiency is still greater than that of the generation and transmission of electric power. In much of the United States, an 80 percent efficient gas furnace costs half as much to run as a 100 percent efficient electric heater because of all the losses upstream of the heater.
Guess what? DOESN'T MATTER - hosts work vs. this! See the mechanics of this thing & it's why the pros recommend using hosts (or other things) vs. cryptocurrency mining scripts https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11268807&cid=55425191/ & I've bounced it off other /.'ers & guess what - I am CORRECT/Right as rain!
*Chump...
APK
P.S.=> It amazes me the SCHMUCKS here that try pull their bullshit to try "make me look bad' & ALL YOU EVER END UP DOING? Is make ME look GOOD, lol... apk
You might want to read up on heat pumps on Wikipedia. Pay particular attention to the "Performance Considerations", which say that a typical heat pump is about as efficient as resistive heating at about -18C (0F). Above that, it's more efficient, perhaps up to four times as efficient. An air conditioner has cold air going into the building and hotter air coming out. Reverse those, with colder air going out, and hotter air going inside, and you're doing the exact same thing for heating. There's going to be resistive heating in any device that uses electricity, but it's not the main heat source.
An air conditioner will have as little resistive heating as possible, and yet it will move heat from a colder place to a warmer place. Reverse that.
As far as heating with natural gas goes, the electric company can buy natural gas at least as cheaply as I can, so if it were more efficient to use electrical resistive heating it would not be so much more expensive. There are ways to extract heat from exhaust gases, so less heat goes outside. People actually think about these things, and have incentives to make gas heaters more efficient.
So, what do my politics have to do with efficiency of heating systems?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I didn't read your comment past the first sentence because you start out with arrogant bullshit where you outright state that you don't give me the respect to even give me the benefit of the doubt that I know the basics. I'm not going to read your screed, I saw the first line that you're so stupid you can't comprehend from my comments that I understand the engineering. That guarantees you didn't say anything interesting.