
Tidbit: Client-Side Bitcoin Mining - aba_sababa
http://www.tidbit.co.in/
======
jlrubin
Hey HN!

I'm Jeremy, one of the devs of this hackathon project. Thanks for checking
this out, glad to see the community has interest in it. We made this project
for NodeKnockout, and did not intend for it to be posted on HN.

In the current release, we have a couple of things blocked out for various
reasons (legal, ethical, etc) so that it is not 100% functional.

We are very well aware that our current hashrate is pretty impractical.
However, there are a number of optimizations we plan to implement to greatly
improve this, including using WebGL. The problem that we're looking at starts
with bitcoin, but we're also looking at more general purpose computing in the
client too (ie, text mining).

And in terms of battery life, yes, it does run up the cpu a bit. However, for
certain users (ie, desktop), spare processor cycles could be more worth it
than seeing ads. Web services using tidbit could make it an opt in thing for
desktop clients.

~~~
Avalaxy
I really like this idea actually. If the performance would be (a lot) better,
it could be a very nice alternative to advertising. Everyone who visits your
website would 'pay' you with some CPU/GPU cycles, and in trade for that you
give them a web page that's completely rid of advertising, third-party
tracking cookies, and other stuff that users find annoying.

Personally I think advertising has been dying for years now, especially with
all the adblockers that become more and more popular. It's time to come up
with an alternative business model for websites (no, not talking about SaaS
here..).

What's your share in this? You take a certain percentage of the mined coins?

Too bad mining is becoming more and more difficult, meaning that you will earn
less and less.

------
nwh
Bear in mind that this will net the creator a few cents a day (if that even),
and burn thousands of dollars in power for their clients. This wasn't
economical in 2011 and it's sure as hell not economical now. I'd be pretty
pissed off is websites started eating my CPU and battery just to make such a
pitiful amount of revenue.

To put this in perspective, for $5 you can buy a USB ASIC miner that will do
335MH/s, worth tens of thousands of full time JavaScript clients.

~~~
wyager
I don't think you can get a USB ASIC for $5. They're still in the tens of
dollars range.

~~~
nwh
For new ones sure, but there's people selling used ones for a lot less.
There's cheaper Bitfury based ones now anyway, so I can't imagine why anybody
would spend their money so unwisely.

------
vbuterin
Seriously? This idea was horrible back when Coinlab tried it in 2012 (
[http://bitcoinmagazine.com/1086/bitcoin-mining-a-new-
means-o...](http://bitcoinmagazine.com/1086/bitcoin-mining-a-new-means-of-
paying-for-video-games/) ) and it's even more horrible now. At the very least
mine Litecoin or Primecoin.

~~~
possibilistic
How do the various cryptocurrencies compare? There appear to be quite a few of
them [1,2]. Are BTC, Litecoin, and Primecoin the best/most popular?

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cryptocurrencies](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cryptocurrencies)

[2]
[https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/List_of_alternative_cryptocurrenc...](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/List_of_alternative_cryptocurrencies)

~~~
andrewla
[http://coinmarketcap.com/](http://coinmarketcap.com/) has estimates of market
capitalization based on exchanges for various cryptocurrencies. A reasonable
proxy for popular in some cases.

~~~
dmix
Litecoin is #2 but when you click the bottom link "Looking for Ripple?",
Ripple is #2.

Ripple/Opencoin has 10x the market cap of Litecoin:
[http://coinmarketcap.com/ripple.html](http://coinmarketcap.com/ripple.html)

But Ripple isn't a typical open source "crypto-currency". It's well financed
and backed by big SF investors with the intention of making the
founders/investors money, instead of miners, as the currency scales in price.

------
ck2
_20K hashes /client_

ha, good luck with that

28nm asic miners are out and they do 600GH/sec at $4k + 1Watt/GHs

bitcoin is just about out of reach for normal people, we missed the train

~~~
possibilistic
I'm only casually familiar with ASIC mining, but I do recall hearing that the
best position to be in is selling tools to the miners. Still, I'm curious; how
much would you have to invest into modern mining hardware in order to see a
return on investment? I'm going to assume you either need a lot of these or
have to join a pool.

Is this a game only playable by those with tens or hundreds of thousands of
dollars?

~~~
Zarathust
The biggest problem with ASIC miners that I see is that they do not ship until
"a few months". With the mining difficulty growing exponentially [1], the
hardware you buy now will be relatively obsolete in a few months. For example
by buying the latest 600GH/s from Butterfly labs[2] at 4500$, you'd break even
in about a month according to the acula mining calculator[3].

The problem is that your card will arrive in January. In 2 months, if the
bitcoin difficulty keeps growning at a steady pace (which is improbably, it
probably keep growing exponentially), the break-even will be closer to 2
months. While you will probably keep making a few hundred of dollars after the
break-even point, your chances to "double up" your initial 4500$ investments
are close to zero. I have no idea about the profit marging ButterflyLabs make
on those cards, but I'd bet it's larger than "a few hundred of dollars".
That's why the mining gear business is probably more profitable than the
mining business itself.

Of course this doesn't stop Butterfly Labs from having large farms of those
cards...

[1] [http://bitcoindifficulty.com/](http://bitcoindifficulty.com/)

[2]
[http://www.butterflylabs.com/monarch/](http://www.butterflylabs.com/monarch/)

[3] [http://www.alcula.com/calculators/finance/bitcoin-
mining/](http://www.alcula.com/calculators/finance/bitcoin-mining/)

~~~
Buge
Butterflylabs is notorious for delivering many months late.

~~~
jpatokal
All the ASIC miners are notorious for delivering many months late.

------
the-kenny
You can be sure that no one with a computer running on a battery will ever
visit your website again...

~~~
mey
Even more so now that Android and OSX indicate at the application level what
is impacting system battery.

------
vezzy-fnord
Couldn't this be considered a malicious feature?

The site offers virtually no information, so is the user notified that their
machine is being used as part of a mining effort, or does it occur silently in
the background?

------
loourr
This should be converted to litecoin, maybe then it would make some money.
1000 KH/s ~0.8 LTC/day so with 50 users all day you would make $4 * 0.8 = $3.2
and if you had a million users it would be worth 64K/day assuming you could
get the same hash rates.

~~~
nadaviv
> assuming you could get the same hash rates

You won't. Litecoin's scrypt is (purposely) much slower.

~~~
loourr
well even assuming it was two orders of magnitude less then bitcoin, it would
still be $640/day which is a good improvement over bitcoin. Based on this,
that seems to be about the actual difference.
[https://litecoin.info/Comparison_between_Litecoin_and_Bitcoi...](https://litecoin.info/Comparison_between_Litecoin_and_Bitcoin#Differences_in_hashing_algorithms)

------
trishume
You would need 500,000 people mining on your site all the time to match one
10GH ASIC...

Any site that constantly has 500,000 active users would have server costs that
dwarf any revenue this would bring.

------
wlk
This is not very new idea, I think this is first PoC I can find quickly:
[https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=166417.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=166417.0)

Given current network difficulty, this won't earn 0.000001 $ per impression
(more exact calculations are needed)

------
joliv
Wow, this is scary. I guess as long as it's EXTREMELY visible that someone
were using up my CPU to make them money, I'd be alright with it, but
otherwise, I would see this as blatant malware.

------
ezstar
If they could somehow get a hold of the GPU and you had the equivalent of 10
decent gaming PCs connected at all times you'd get a little over $450 a year
by my lazy calculations

[http://i.imgur.com/jrHoaOV.png](http://i.imgur.com/jrHoaOV.png)

------
sofocles
In fact, I'm testing it now and the indicator "connected clients" does not
rise above 0. Probably, not even works. This is an experiment for a contest =>
[http://nodeknockout.com/](http://nodeknockout.com/)

~~~
ezstar
Same here, would like to give it a try at least

------
mistercow
Aren't we well past the point where bitcoin mining on general purpose hardware
costs more in energy usage than you earn by mining? I don't think that a model
that has you earning less for viewing your site than the power company is
going to be viable.

~~~
teraflop
We're long past the point where mining on a GPU makes economic sense, and this
thing is roughly 1/10,000 as energy-efficient as a GPU.

------
nathas
This seems real scary. "Give us your wallet address, email, and a password,
then let us run a bitcoin miner for everyone that hits your page that may
magically cash out any where."

Mmm... Although if it's legit I'd use it, but only if it's open source.

~~~
simlevesque
Just make a bitcoin wallet for this sole purpose, if they steal it then it
won't be that bad.

------
nikoftime
Reminded me of the Unoceros team, and their SDK (currently in Alpha):
[http://unoceros.com/](http://unoceros.com/)

The idea is "make money with your phone, in the background."

------
gesman
This will bring to your business $0.0001 /per month. Or less.

Sign up here....

------
Ihmahr
So how many live clients would you need to mine 0.1 bc/day?

~~~
Scaevolus
5 million, given present work factor and 20khashes/s per client.

~~~
xSwag
For what time duration?

~~~
veemjeem
1 day? I think it was mentioned in OP in the form of 0.1bc/day. If someone big
like cnn.com integrates this js code, you might make $20 a day. I still think
adsense has better pay with that many viewers. One would need 5 million
visitors to stay on your site for 24 hours. There are very few websites where
people do that... maybe facebook/gmail.

------
fbpcm
24 million hours at 20KH/sec nets you $6.80 at current difficulty and price.

------
knodi
20k hash rate is too low, even with 20k live clients.

------
mmagin
Now that's an efficient use of CPUs!

------
mkramlich
related to the article's topic: anyone with a major interest in the
security/robustness of Bitcoin miners, please contact me. email in my profile
here.

