PirateBay probably won't make any money. I'm considering adding this to an online game, which would probably generate a modest income. Video and social media sites could definitely benefit as well.
I think this would be fine as long as you have the users' consent. I suppose you could even give out rewards to players based on how much they contribute. I see this model in a lot of Android games nowadays (although with ads), you are asked to look at an ad/watch a 30 second video, and in return you get a small amount of in-game currency otherwise only obtainable through spending money.
In the discussion yesterday I estimated 2-5 cents per 24 hours of mining on a users machine (based on quoted hashrates and current prices). That's really not much, even if people actively let it run to help and there is a medium efficiency gain to have somewhere.
It's a card game simulator I have yet to publish. I don't really have a lot of money for server uptime, so it's either ads or this. And it won't be on by default. I'm simply offering users a way to support the site if they like using it, without having to view ads or pay directly (it may or may not affect their electricity bill I guess, but to most people an online game using some extra CPU isn't going to have much impact on them at all).
You are talking about server costs. Get a server at for example online.net (not affiliated) for $9/month or cheaper. That server is going to be able to run your card game easily.
You don't need to spend hundreds of dollars on AWS.
You don't know what my site requires, so you're assuming that whatever hosting you just randomly want to assume is sufficient is enough and so you can discredit my legitimate idea for a possible way to get the required cost to run my site, and possibly also make a little profit. Would you rather have me borrow user's time and attention with ads, or bottom a few of their precious millions of CPU cycles per second? And in case you didn't read what I wrote, I'm not "stealing" anything. The site will be hosted either way, if I have to pay for it out of pocket at a loss then fine. But if people would like to donate CPU time to support the project, there is an off-by-default option to do so, just like there's an off-by-default option to donate money. I fail to see how this is evil.
Yes. Websites stealing cpu time to mine crypto currency is ridiculous. I'd go as far as calling it malware. It's a waste of my power and will wear out my hardware faster than necessary. It's also bad for the environment due to useless power drain.
If we're talking about a server for a card game you can just get a cheapo dedicated server and you'll be fine. Get a user or two to donate once a month and you will even run a profit. Or skip that Starbucks once a month.
What about what he said implies he's doing it in a scummy way? Something like this, opt in and transparent, would be much preferred over microtransactions or ads, IMO.