
Could cryptocurrency mining kill online advertising? - MilnerRoute
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/could-cryptocurrency-kill-online-advertising-carl-whalley/
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3pt14159
Disclosure: I own Bitcoin, Dash, and Sia, but I've sold most of my Bitcoin.

I'm surprised I even have to spell this out for people, but here goes:

Mining stops the double spend problem just like market makers solve the
liquidity problem: A little bit is great, but at scale it's divorced from the
public good it provides. We don't need the amount of mining that is going on
in Bitcoin right now. It's just wasted cycles because of the economics of the
damn thing.

What fundamental good does spreading any PoW to millions or billions of
devices accomplish? Nothing. That is why cryptocurrency mining will never take
over advertising.

What _should_ take over advertising (if anything) is micropayments built into
the browser. Maybe with some sort of probabilistic or web-of-trust mechanism
on top to prevent the bookkeeping burden from overtaking the payment amount.

The problem with advertising is that it rots peoples minds and makes certain
classes of goods compete on brand instead of competing on quality.

~~~
beaner
Advertising will never go away. You pay for cable, yet cable still has ads.
Micropayments could potentially be adopted as a short-term alternative, but if
it were ever to become the status quo, publishers would just start adding
advertisements on top. Then we'd have a system where we both pay money
directly, and also have ads, which would be worse.

~~~
3pt14159
It doesn’t take that much machine learning to identify an ad and if micro
payments were built into the browser they could be trivially tuned to only
award payments on non-advertisers.

~~~
alwillis
You can participate with this now using Brave, a Chromium-based browser that
uses cryptocurrency-based micropayments to pay for content while blocking
adds: [https://brave.com](https://brave.com)

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maltalex
Although outraged by the idea at first, I have to say that there are some
benefits here:

0\. This starves the advertising industry, which has insatiable apatite for
private information, and questionable practices of obtaining it.

1\. Payment is done using only CPU power and you electric bill which are
private, and the process itself could be made secure and efficient by
incorporating it into browsers.

2\. Sites no longer have to trick you or your ad blocker into watching
something you don't want to watch (or clicking on it). Instead, they are
motivated to keep you on their site longer. It's not perfect, and trickery
still might be involved, but it still seems like a better motivation. Heck,
some sites might even try to keep you by producing solid content.

3\. Journalists get an income source without any political strings attached,
they don't have to worry about writing something bad about some major
advertiser.

However, I'm really not sure about the economics of all of this. How many CPU
cycles does it take to replace a single ad?

Plus, wasting all of those CPU cycles on mining produces nothing of actual
value. I'd much rather auction off some of my CPU time to the highest bidder
or contribute it to some worthy cause.

~~~
zeep
> 1\. Payment is done using only CPU power and you electric bill which are
> private, and the process itself could be made secure and efficient by
> incorporating it into browsers.

Not really private... my electric meter broadcasts my power consumption in
plain text on the 900MHz ISM band every minute... I used this program to read
the meters of all my neighbors:
[https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr](https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr) ...
You probably also can buy the data from the power companies...

~~~
maltalex
Ok, so it's not 100% private. But still, no one knows who you've contributed
to, and how much. Heck, no one even knows whether you've contributed anything
at all; maybe you just ran your washing machine.

As far as passing money between people goes, it's more private than giving
someone cash in a back alley.

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thinkloop
Like others have mentioned, the economics are not good, mining is too
competitive to be done on commodity hardware. Consider that over half of
browsing now happens on mobile, and it becomes clear that very few people can
participate.

~~~
ColanR
That's not actually true - some coins are designed to be used on "commodity
hardware". Monero is one, and it's what Coinbase uses.

Last I counted, my estimate on profitability was 0.006 cents / computer /
minute.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/62m5mu/eli5_why_can...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/62m5mu/eli5_why_can_you_still_mine_monero_on_a_laptop/)

~~~
jstanley
In what way does Coinbase use Monero?

~~~
Deimorz
I'm sure they meant Coinhive, not Coinbase.

~~~
ColanR
ya, thanks.

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cupscale
Someone did the math on this, right? I thought the amount of revenue generated
was a complete pittance.

More likely, this is just something sites start doing _on top_ of advertising.

~~~
aaron-lebo
They did the last few times it was attempted.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=javascript%20miner&sort=byPopu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=javascript%20miner&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

There's this great blurb:

 _We 're a bit saddened to see that some of our customers integrate Coinhive
into their pages without disclosing to their users what's going on, let alone
asking for their permission. We believe there's so much more potential for our
solution, but we have to be respectful to our end users._

[https://coinhive.com/blog/status-report](https://coinhive.com/blog/status-
report)

It'd be awesome if someone did a comprehensive breakdown. If you scale this up
to remove ads from 10% of the net or 30%, does it stay valuable with that
mining power added to a single coin? Or does this business model require the
continued pump and dump of worthless coins? What kind of energy and workload
is this putting on user machines (in many cases without permission)?

If I run across a site that is mining without notice and permission, I'll
never visit again, as best as I can. I don't want to support that. Hosting
websites is relatively cheap, if companies weren't writing such bloated
software, their costs would be much lower. Fix that first without adding more
junk to the tech community, please.

~~~
yuhong
Yea, the problem is the debt-based economy leading to things like the ad
bubble in the first place. Mining is a process leading to a block reward too,
and obviously typically as hashrate increases the difficulty increases too.

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zython
> Hey, we spent a good fortune to make this site run on all devices,
> responsive and usable. Lets slow it down to mine *coin, we'll be able to
> make dozens, DOZENS !!

~~~
olegkikin
Depends on the traffic of the website and how long the visitors stay on it.

According to coinwarz you can make $5.1 for 24 hours of mining on CPU/GPU, but
realistically (for an average visitor) probably closer to $1/24hrs. If we take
Reddit, which has 13 minutes average visit, probably between 5M and 50M daily
visits.

That's $45K - $451K daily revenue.

That's probably more than their ad revenue.

[https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/reddit-
stats/](https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/reddit-stats/)

------
Animats
No. It's a bottom-feeder thing and doesn't generate that much revenue anyway.

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beager
Advertising is only valuable when the user is engaged with the device. It's a
very poor model for mining. Why not:

1\. Sell compute when people aren't using their machines and split the spoils
(not actually profitable for people who pay their own electric bills, but you
don't have to say that)

2\. Just create malware miners that run all the time.

------
wolco
Never because if everyone adopted this the difficulty rating would go up by a
factor of everyone.

Currently it will take you two years of one the newer computers running
constantly to even meet half of the min payout on coinhive.

The more people the greater the difficulity. Lose-lose for everyone.

Ads are great. The current trend against them is shortsighted. Without ads we
would be paying for content in walled gardens with less share-ability. Content
would he hoarded and tokenized as opposited to widely shared.

Out of the 60 top thread would you micropay to read them all? No but someone
does for each one and writes a summary in the comments. Lose-lose because the
site gets less money/traffic the readers rely on secondhand information and no
one is better off aside from the micropayment provider who takes a cut.

------
CapsAdmin
It's an interesting idea but I don't trust that websites will use "a little
bit of my CPU" to mine cryptocurrencies. All they have to do is increase a
number somewhere to earn more money which is too tempting.

If people complain they'll just do it very slowly.

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samsonradu
Can someone explain briefly how this works? I was under the assumption that
you need to download the blockchain to be able to mine. Or in-browser mining
just takes stabs in the dark?

~~~
eterm
Mining is typically something like:

Hash(nonce + Hash(chain[including with new transactions])) < value.

So in some sense you need the chain but you can pass Hash(chain) to a client
and let that just increase nonce and hash it.

Without synchronisation the found block might be for a stale chain but if
you're using someone else's power you don't care, and the nature of
distribution here means it's likely to be fresh anyway in the unlikely chance
something is found.

~~~
dmurray
For anyone who was thinking, like me, "If that formula is correct, couldn't
you precompute hashes and then subtract Hash(chain) to get the desired nonce",
it's more like

Hash(nonce + 2^256 * Hash(chain[including with new transactions])) < value

Still an oversimplification, of course.

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stuntkite
This article's premise is about how we are on the edge of new disruption. They
seem to think it's all been done rather than we are now sitting on innovations
that require an unwritten playbook. Kinda like google, smart phones, or
Amazon/eBay in the beginning. The talent pool is small again and specialized.
The story is far from written.

~~~
hssys
Written?

~~~
stuntkite
Thanks. Sorry on mobile in an airport.

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_jezell_
You mean all that slow down when I visit Mashable isn't from generating crypto
coins?

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everdev
Revenue sources are rarely killed, usually supplemented. The only way to kill
online advertising is if it stops being profitable for advertisers.

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jbverschoor
No. It user experience and so conversion rate. It also kills battery life and
therefore everything on the planet

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pdimitar
Never gonna work. The publishers will simply add advertising again at some
point so they're gonna reap double benefits.

These people need to care for pigs. Or better yet, go homeless and dig for
peach pits in a dumpster.

They won't _ever_ learn.

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neka
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

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dang
Url changed from [https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/10/22/1839226/could-
crypt...](https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/10/22/1839226/could-
cryptocurrency-mining-kill-online-advertising), which points to this.

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ada1981
As I've said before, when a headline asks a question, the answer is almost
certainly "No."

