| > - unblockable advertising Ad blockers primarily look at domains, so blocking will continue to be possible at the request level. They aren't interpreting or parsing JS to begin with. > - stronger DRM If sites were going to ship Web Assembly-based DRM, they would already be shipping Web Assembly along with the Emterpreter. Remember that wasm has a polyfill already. I haven't seen that happening, so I see no reason to believe it'll happen in the future. > - Bitcoin mining that regular user can't detect A regular user certainly would notice the 100% CPU consumption. And anyway, bitcoin mining in a WebGL shader would be more profitable than anything wasm-based. Moreover, though, surreptitious bitcoin mining on consumer PCs would be ludicrously unprofitable no matter what. Here a Stack Overflow answer from last year that calculates how much a site with 2M daily visitors would make if they could all somehow run the fastest C implementation [1]. It was less than 50 cents a day back then, and in the meantime the hash rate has grown by nearly an order of magnitude [2]. Good luck. [1]: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/42413 [2]: https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate?timespan=2years |
One cool idea that is also gaining traction is in-browser proof of work to prevent DDOS attacks. Basically you have to perform a lengthy computation to get past the (fast, ultra-high bandwidth) firewall. Doesn't slow down the individual user much, but makes an attack much more difficult. I could imagine people using malicious JS to get these proof-of-work tokens.
But yeah, computing power in the cloud has become fairly cheap, it's really hard to see how criminals could benefit from secretly serving WebAssembly to people.