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.

Comments

Kill...

[Known Nutter]

You couldn't kill online advertising if you nuked it from orbit.

Re: Kill...

[Z00L00K]

Online advertising? Haven't seen that in a while though except some forum spam. In general I see more spam mail and forum spam posts than web page ads these days.

As for cryptocurrency - that may be something that the governments will try to stop in the future since they can't tax the transactions as it is now. That will be their primary concern - taxes.

Yes it could

[goombah99]

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.

Re:Yes it could

[thegarbz]

WHich is why Google is making its browser combat it.

Or maybe it doesn't want to be associated with painfully slow browsing experience and a product which appears to peg the CPU.

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).

I prefer a cheaper and more environmentally friendly way of heating my house combined with a little bit of control over when I heat (i.e. not when the doors are open, in the summer etc.) I take it a 6 month hiatus from the internet is off the cards? In which case all you're doing is spending 10c more to cool your house.

And if I find it's tying up my computer then I just leave the web site.

Or we could do something such as throttle the website when it ties up the computer, and completely halt the process when the website itself isn't active. Kind of like what Google proposed.

google should be afraid.

No they shouldn't. The economics of mining on the CPU make even less sense than the economics of online adverts, especially when the end result is something incredibly unstable which could half in value overnight.

This was some pie in the sky idea that was trialled at one point. It is utterly pointless using this as a way to attempt to pay for websites.

Re:Yes it could

[AvitarX]

An article here estimated that the pirate bay could get $12,000/month from this technique, that barely covers operating expenses.

Perhaps the Pirate Bay can't get more from ads, but I'm willing to bet a more "legitimate" site with similar traffic could have higher value ads.

So:
1) this barely covers expenses of a site
2) it doesn't even close to cover what ads from a traditional site could.

It's not the way of the future at all.

Re:Yes it could

[mellon]

Yeah, the main issue I have with this is that it just seems silly. Why not cut to the chase and just do micropayments. But if it's a path to micropayments, I guess that's okay too.

FWIW, Google actually had a micropayment service, but O(nobody) on the provider side went for it.

Re:Yes it could

[phantomfive]

The economics of mining on the CPU make even less sense than the economics of online adverts,

Intuitively I think you are right (partially because adverts can pay a lot), but I'd like to see an analysis of this. Is it actually economically feasible to pay for your servers with bitcoin mining? You would have to take into consideration a lot of factors.....among them the fact that mining gets more expensive the more people are working on it.

Re:Yes it could

[AvitarX]

Because ads earn about $0.001/impression. (link https://www.quora.com/How-much...)

so three impressions per a minutes (scrolling down a loud website) = $0.003/minute, this is across all devices, including relatively low power ones such as phones. (random estimation, not sure if the link is page view or ad view)

I pay .17/kWh (total electric bill divided by total usage, $.145 may be more accurate as it's the cumulative variable part).

We'll use 30 watts/minute for usage spike of a computer with any real power.

30 watt minutes = .5 watt hours = .0005 kWh = $0.000085 of electricity available to make up that $0.003 of ad view.

Sure these numbers include assumptions, but are 2 orders of magnitude too low. The only site where this makes any bit of sense is one that can't get traditional advertising.

Anyway, thanks for making be double check my gut assumptions, because I was just guessing until now.

Re:Yes it could

[Neuronwelder]

I see your point, but I'm more worried that some nut is going to use this potentially powerful engine to run DOS attacks or some other evil thing.

Re:Yes it could

[Gavagai80]

Cryptocurrency mining needs to be illegal -- it's already using a significant and growing percentage of the world's electricity output to produce absolutely nothing useful, and causing thousands of pollution deaths around the world as a result each year.

Re:Yes it could

[swillden]

So:
1) this barely covers expenses of a site
2) it doesn't even close to cover what ads from a traditional site could.

3) if in-browser mining makes sense, it makes even more sense to mine and show ads.

Not the real problem

[phantomfive]

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.

Nope

[markdavis]

>"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.

Re:Nope

[DontBeAMoran]

5) I doubt there is enough money in mining

Since Monero seems to be the one used right now, let's see some numbers:
- My Intel i5 3.2GHz, on four cores dedicated to the task of mining Monero, has a 24 hours average of around 140 H/s. Let's say Javascript can only run on one core, so 35 H/s. Let's say the websites don't want to piss off their users, so let's throttle back to 50% of one thread, let's round up to 18 H/s.

According to various calculators and charts online, that only gives you about 0.0000146083 XMR / 0.00000021 BTC / 0.0012472178 $USD per hour of mining. That's an almost non-existant 0.00000034644939 $USD per second.

But now, assuming the average visitors means how many people are viewing your page at the same time, constantly. All values in U.S.A. dollars:
1K users = 0.00 per second, 0.02 per minute, 1.24 per hour, 29.93 per day.
10K users = 0.00 per second, 0.20 per minute, 12.47 per hour, 299.33 per day.
100K users = 0.03 per second, 2.07 per minute, 124.72 per hour, 2993.32 per day.
1 million users = 0.34 per second, 20.78 per minute, 1247.21 per hour, 29933.22 per day.

Even with only a constant one thousand visitors at a time, it's worth doing it for nearly 900 dollars per month. Let's say the actual numbers are 1/10th of that because of mobile devices, it's still worth doing it since it's free money.

I don't know how much income ads would give to a website with a constant average of 1000 visitors but it's probably much lower than 90 dollars per month. It's probably less than their minimum number of visitors required for payments. With crypto-mining, you're not at the mercy of Google or others. Every fraction of a penny is earned.

No. Also no.

[Presence Eternal]

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.

Re:No. Also no.

[DontBeAMoran]

1. My place has electric heating. In the winter it makes sense to heat up the place and mine coins at the same time.
2. My electricity doesn't cost as much as in the U.S.A.
3. My electricity comes mainly from hydro-power.

Re:No. Also no.

[Aighearach]

This is one of the secrets of power efficiency; if extra heat is doing work, then application efficiency approaches 100% because most waste is heat!

Of course in the summer it often goes the other way, and you pay twice for the heat; once for the electricity that got wasted, and again to run an air conditioner.

The cost is 1000:1

[FeelGood314]

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.

Re:Not on mobile

[DontBeAMoran]

How do you expect me to mine coins in the background?

With a pickaxe, like the rest of us?

No

[dr.Flake]

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.

As if it's an either/or proposition

[FritzTheCat1030]

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.

Simple math

[fluffernutter]

Mining only, a website makes $X,
with ads and mining, a website makes $X+$Y.
No, online ads are not going anywhere.