Could Cryptocurrency Kill Online Advertising?

Megalith

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Could “Cryptojacking,” the process of running code in a visitor’s browser to mine online currency, be the end of online advertising? Some argue that this is a possibility, as the average user would be less annoyed by their CPU getting a higher (but imperceivable) workout than ads obstructing or convoluting content.

Users get more content when there are no ads, so prefer sites without them or use ad blockers. Is this a new way to fund these websites - one which users won't notice apart from the benefit of no ads? Yikes! That's what made the internet giants what they are today - and has given many other businesses an otherwise impossible boost by running online campaigns for themselves! If online advertising were to disappear from the internet, we'd be in for a whole new kind of "disruption" for which a word has not yet been invented.
 
Before it even gets off the ground people will put a stop to it. Adblockers are adding cryptoblockers and eventually even web browsers will put a stop to it. If not them then the community will make special versions of FireFox or Chromium to put a stop to it.
 
Can someone explain to me how it makes any sense logically, to force a computer to user real electricity to produce something that isn't real but that is used as a currency? I understand how it works, I don't understand why it *should* be a thing. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
 
Can someone explain to me how it makes any sense logically, to force a computer to user real electricity to produce something that isn't real but that is used as a currency? I understand how it works, I don't understand why it *should* be a thing. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
You're making them use electricity to power the site you're browsing. And 20% on a core or two is nothing. I'm only concerned they'll get greedy and work toward 100% as the difficulty to mine increases... I'm personally fine contribuing some of my resources (power) to fund the site's I regularly visit as long as there is some sort of standard that keeps it manageable and unnoticed.
 
When have ads or any form of annoyance ever decreased? It seems like a declined user experience and increased annoyance level are in direct correlation to site revenue. How's it possible the more pissed off I am at some random website, the more money it makes?

As others have said, this will simply be one more item tacked on to an ever growing list of varying monetization.
 
No, because the big sites will just go "why not do both?"

They'll mine and have a ton of ads. I doubt we'll see many sites that remove their ads in place of a miner.
 
Most crypto currencies have a finite supply and are designed so that later coins are harder to mine then earlier ones. At some point, it will be hard for a part time browser script to earn enough to replace the revenue stream from ads. Near the start of Bitcoin, a basic laptop could mine a significant number of Bitcoin. Now it takes a major setup to be time effective. Even with a herd of web browsers serving as a distributed processing rig, there will come a point when they just can't generate enough fractions of a Bitcoin to be worth the trouble.
 
Getting online without ad and script blocking these days is an all-out assault on the senses and your machine. Yeah, let's just throw another thing into the mix that even more directly targets your CPU in addition to everything else.

It reminds me of the argument UBI proponents make about how it would be cheaper because we could eliminate all the other entitlements, when you know damn well those other entitlements won't go away, or if they do, they will eventually creep back in.

As in so many things, give an inch and they'll take a mile.
 
If it ran on an extension I install and I can throttle the CPU usage to my tastes, I might consider it. But most likely it will be CPU theft and ads.
 
No, just no...
You pretty much can't stop it at this point without disabling your browsing to just plain HTML. There's no controls in your browser normally to restrict a webpage from doing whatever it wants in its sandbox in terms of performing calculations.
 
Most crypto currencies have a finite supply and are designed so that later coins are harder to mine then earlier ones. At some point, it will be hard for a part time browser script to earn enough to replace the revenue stream from ads. Near the start of Bitcoin, a basic laptop could mine a significant number of Bitcoin. Now it takes a major setup to be time effective. Even with a herd of web browsers serving as a distributed processing rig, there will come a point when they just can't generate enough fractions of a Bitcoin to be worth the trouble.
If a coin became that computationally intensive, no one would be able mine a new coin.
 
Nope. We will now get ads AND cryptojacking.
Survey says... *DIIIIIIIIIING!*

Yeah why would people give up something, people are fucking greedy that way. Oh hey I get money from crypto... and I can get money from ads too!? ERMAGERD!
 
Ads will never go away. People misunderstand what is actually being bought and sold with ads. Its not the ads, its the PERSON. When *YOU* are on a site with ads, *YOU* are being marketed and sold (if you click) to an advertiser. The only way ads go away on the internet is if no real people use the internet anymore.

Edit:
Also wanted to add.. I am old enough to remember when cable TV first started. Guess what? There were no commercials during the shows! Reason being is you had to pay for the stations, so there wasnt the need for commercials. Then they figured out people were used to commercials and would pay for cable simply for the more variety of content/channels. Moral of the story is while some places may go the route of turning off ads in favor of crypto-mining, but if you have a marketable audience, you are going to get both.
 
You pretty much can't stop it at this point without disabling your browsing to just plain HTML. There's no controls in your browser normally to restrict a webpage from doing whatever it wants in its sandbox in terms of performing calculations.

You can disable javascript on a given site.
 
If it ran on an extension I install and I can throttle the CPU usage to my tastes, I might consider it. But most likely it will be CPU theft and ads.

Opt in and user controlled, I wouldn't mind this and probably would participate for my favorite websites. But ya it probably won't and will just be some background hidden process adding yet another security exploit.
 
There is no way, google would shut them down before they can get far. The websites do that would fall off the search ranking and disappear forever.
 
If a coin became that computationally intensive, no one would be able mine a new coin.

The coins out there right now are indeed that computationally intensive. However, what you need to understand is the work can easily be divided up into smaller portions of lower difficulty which can individually be distributed amongst any number of "computational nodes". There could be a point in the not too distant future where there are no new coins of relevance to mine, but then the existing "miners" will be used to actually facilitate the transactions within the network, so its still not going to ever go away. This stuff is here to stay.
 
Can someone explain to me how it makes any sense logically, to force a computer to user real electricity to produce something that isn't real but that is used as a currency? I understand how it works, I don't understand why it *should* be a thing. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

Because some entity is backing it up with real currency.

Our current currencies are also not real, in the sense that the government can make money from thin air, by printing more currency.
AKA Fiat currency.
Fiat currency is also valueless.

The only reason fiat currency works, is because the government that issues it is in stable power and backs the legal tender up with full faith.
Should the government become unstable, you will see things like hyperinflation, or legal tenders that turn into worthless pieces of paper.

bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies work in a similar fashion as legal tenders. Someone or something is backing it up with full faith.
Who or what that is... I don't know.
 
Again, I understand how it works.

Yet no one is able to explain why enslaving PCs is okay. To use real electricity and produce nothing with it, is not okay. It doesn't matter who profits from it, it's a point blank stupid idea for currency creation.
 
Again, I understand how it works.

Yet no one is able to explain why enslaving PCs is okay. To use real electricity and produce nothing with it, is not okay. It doesn't matter who profits from it, it's a point blank stupid idea for currency creation.
You're acting like cryptocurrency is the only application of a computer which consumes electricity to produce "nothing" physically.
 
I'm in the middle of an off grid project where I am building my new home to be as off grid as reasonably possible. The goal is to be 60% off grid in 18 months and push to 90% over the next decade or so as technology evolves and makes it more reasonable to achieve. Things like this are making the appeal of finally just abandoning the internet as a whole more and more worth giving consideration.
 
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I would pay for a cpu on a usb thumbdrive which would run whatever the site wants to run...if it were firewalled off from my rig. And, as long as I never saw an ad. (Yes, I donate monthly to [H] through patreon.)
 
Opt in and user controlled, I wouldn't mind this and probably would participate for my favorite websites. But ya it probably won't and will just be some background hidden process adding yet another security exploit.
That's the problem with this stuff. It is never opt-in and only disclosed in a tiny sentence buried some where on the site that normally no one would see.
 
Saying that websites would continue to spam users with both ads and cryptojacking is like saying "why stop with 1 popup ad when we can use 2?". Website operators understand there is a threshold for tolerance. Google is already scrambling to block this kind of revenue stream for operators, however if given an option upon visiting your site for an "ad free experience" by just clicking a button that allows the mining to happen I think most people will go that route. If they try to force ads anyway then people will continue to use their adblockers and allow Google to "protect" them from mining any way they see fit.
 
Oddly I gotta ask, didn't this already happen once before? I want to say it was in one of the content providers such as Origin someone had slipped in a bitcoin miner program which wound up roasting some gamers video cards many years back.

With that said, I wouldn't mind it if and only if I could...
Configure the min/max used on my CPU/GPU
Configure the maximum run time post closure of the page(s) in question
Configure the page allocation of resources for times I have multiple tabs open that have cryptocurrency miners running
Configure the option to have conventional ads vs mining vs website paetreon supporter
Configure an automatic block for old insecure mining versions.
 
Just imagine the return on investment for an organization with say.. Thousands of tens of thousands of users... or Virtual environments with literally 100's of un used cores... sitting there doing nothing... You make an site.. Like what we are discussing.. require users to keep it open while they are logged in. And and reap the rewards. Now some testing would need to be done on power consumption vs net gain of course. But I think it could be something.
 
Can someone explain to me how it makes any sense logically, to force a computer to user real electricity to produce something that isn't real but that is used as a currency? I understand how it works, I don't understand why it *should* be a thing. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
All they care about is getting money. All people used to frown at big corporations fucking up the environment and creating ecological disasters out of neglect and greed. And when they get the opportunity to do something that is the same on on room scale, they do it in a heartbeat. They aren't even conflicted about it. They just don't give a shit.
 
I would pay for a cpu on a usb thumbdrive which would run whatever the site wants to run...if it were firewalled off from my rig. And, as long as I never saw an ad. (Yes, I donate monthly to [H] through patreon.)
Then instead of running a cpu wasting resources you should just give the money you'd spend on that cpu and the electricity it uses to the site you want to help. It's a much more effective use of resources. First law of thermodynamics.
 
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