[thinbeige]

Today I read that The Pirate Bay tested this new form of monetization (running a miner in you browser). I thought that might solve website monetization finally. We still have to figure out stuff like battery draining on mobile but it is the first step and I can buy some Monero which is well suited for JS/CPU mining (or in other words, it doesn't have a huge upside when mined on GPUs).

And what do I see here? That before it even started people are fighting it.

Found this solution better than ads and infinetely loading ad-tech JS files.

[gkya]

I'd rather pay with my wallet than with my battery. And I'll pay only what I buy. Lock me out if I don't pay, or tell me to GTFO, and I'm totally fine with it, but you can't pick my hypotethical-pocket because I opened up your page. This is like charging window-shoppers.

And like a sibling comment says, if this catches on, most web sites will do both, i.e. ads + client-side mining.

One nice day publishing industry will no longer be an industry but a group of non-profits, which won't have to sell stuff, and publish way more objective and high-quality stuff.

edit: grammar

[saimiam]

> rather pay with my wallet

I'm going to throw my solution in the ring for HN's consideration - https://Datajoy.us/fupm.html: lets make paying for content so simple that both you and the domain owner can happily set it up and let it do its thing behind the scenes as you surf the web.

Right now, it is being trialed for blogs and other top level domain content providers. First payments will be made Oct 1st.

[gkya]

Looks interesting. Maybe you should submit it here for discussion and publicity.

[saimiam]

Thank you. I have submitted it before - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15197728

If there's interest, I can resubmit it as a new Show HN thread.

[sillysaurus3]

I'd argue that ads already pick your pocket just for window shopping the page.

There's no such thing as Adblock for video streams on Twitch anymore; the ads are burned into the stream, so you can't block them. (Hopefully YouTube won't switch to the same tech.)

Is that picking your pocket just for watching a video steam? If not, why is a video steam materially different from consuming a website?

[gkya]

Ad money comes from a third party, not me. Whereas with this coinhive thing, I'm paying with my computational power and my battery (which is the most important thing here). Traditional internet ads increase resource consumption too, which is part of why we block them. Ads that are part of a video are different, you can skip them, and they cant breach your privacy (I dont know what Twitch are doing, though).

[sillysaurus3]

(You can't skip them, sadly. The video won't buffer until the ad has fully buffered, which happens in real time.)

[sleepychu]

Baked in v.s. player.

[Tharre]

> the ads are burned into the stream, so you can't block them.

Source? Adblock seems to work fine.

[sillysaurus3]

https://help.getadblock.com/support/solutions/articles/60001...

It's clearly the future of ad delivery. If you burn ads into video, you can't block them short of doing some kind of realtime detection against the video frames.

It absolutely sucks because the pause button has become a "play ad" button. There's no way to temporarily pause anymore without showing an ad. Hopefully they won't realize they can do the same thing for the mute button.

[otakucode]

Back before cable companies gave everyone a DVR to try to kill Tivo (their plan was kill Tivo then kill the DVR but courts got in their way), I had a hacked Tivo with a network card. I could pull recorded shows off onto my PC. And then the PC would run a custom bit of software that would process the video and strip out the commercials (or you could have it just insert auto-jumps for the Tivo to follow). That was back in the very early 2000s... so I'd expect this would not be difficult at all now. The software back then did raw processing of the stream and, as I understood it, looked for stacks of I-frames and fade-to-black as well as volume differences. Those stats might be different for online ads, but a little experimentation would solve it.

[devotedtoneu]

I'm being unrelated, but thank you for this comment.

This instantly brought me back to the 2003/2004 Computer Magazine articles with customized TiVo Setups or homebrewed alternatives entirely running on a media center PC.

[Tharre]

The fix for that is simple, use an external player, then they can't mess with your stop/mute/whatever buttons.

I still can't reproduce any of this though, I get 0 ads on any of the streams I clicked through.

EDIT: To fix stop/start you of course need to keep buffering the video.

[sillysaurus3]

That'd fix the mute button, but if you stop and start the stream, you'll get an ad regardless of the player.

Tune in to Vinesauce (https://twitch.tv/vinesauce) tonight at around 9PM-10PM PST. In addition to being a fun Sunday stream, you'll be able to see first hand what the new ad delivery system is like.

[earenndil]

I believe some university was working on a computer vision-based adblock.

[_coldfire]

And how much computational power will that need?

[tw04]

...you do realize "non-profit" doesn't mean they don't make money, right? It means they don't show a profit. They still need to monetize their offering, and unless you've got a solution yet to be offered up... it'll be the exact same thing as "for-profit" companies do. As for "objective" - most non-profits are far less objective because they thrive off donations.

[curun1r]

Ugh...no. The carbon footprint of cryptocurrencies is already borderline-unconscionable, and that's with purpose-built hardware that achieves efficiency beyond what consumer-grade equipment can. Moving mining onto consumer hardware and implementing it in JavaScript is a huge step backwards.

[thinkloop]

The idea that mining is a waste is a bit strange to me - of course it is a waste, that is the genius insight of it all. Waste is the most powerful thing, it is pure cost, the hardest thing to do, raw sacrifice. There are no tricks or shortcuts to over-taking the blockchain, just pure cost and waste. If the proof-of-work had value and could be sold, it would make the network less safe, and less predictable, subject to the whims of the market for its output, and able to fund its attackers while they attack. Proof-of-work is a nice way of saying proof-of-waste.

There are other types of consensus mechanisms, like proof-of-stake, that are much more energy efficient, with their own set of pros and cons. They should, and will, exist; but there will still always be at least one proof-of-waste blockchain. Waste is the gold-standard of expense.

The environment issue is a societal one. We need to move to clean energy, and we are.

[aoeusnth1]

Two quibbles I have with this argument:

1. PoW based on waste which has massive negative externalities is abusive. Power generation generally has large negative externalities. Bitcoin kills.

2. PoS is just another type of PoW - people will compete to earn the PoS rewards up until they are "burning" 0.99 worth of potential ETH they could have earned (with stocks or bonds for example) for every 1 ETH they earn through PoW. The difference is, PoS has nearly 0 negative externalities and is funded entirely through capital which was created out of thin air, namely, ETH. The capital required to fund BTC's PoW comes externally. So switching to PoW is a capital-creating act and naturally increases the value of the currency & network.

[thinkloop]

Abusive is not a fair word. The system allows for something that was never before possible. Waste is how it works. Everything takes energy to accomplish, every input to a process is waste in the end. The total cost vs. benefit is what matters. We could each name many things in society that produce much more carbon, that are much less useful than a decentralized ledger - and no-one would call them abusive.

[aoeusnth1]

Call it what you want, but the language of "negative externality" is too clinical in my opinion when it refers to killing people and putting the stability of the entire planet at risk, especially when perfectly adequate non-destructive PoW systems exist, namely, PoS.

[thinkloop]

I am a fan of PoS, but it is still different from PoW, with its own set of risks and benefits. Decentralized databases are important and society should have redundancy in their implementations. PoW is still the gold standard.

There are many things that cost the environment much more than Bitcoin, that are much less useful (almost everything?), where is the resistance to those.

Basically if you use resources to build a machine that does something, or just burn the equivalent amount of resources to achieve the same thing, it's about the same.

Cruise ships probably harm the environment significantly more than Bitcoin, are you mad at them?

[rhaps0dy]

Typo, I believe: switching to PoS is a capital-creating act, not PoW!

PoW is disgusting.

[aoeusnth1]

Yeah, I meant switching to PoS (damn tired parent brain)

[Marazan]

It's not genius it's worse is better.

Any idiot can come up with the idea of competitively burning electricity to secure a source of truth. But it ignores what happens in x years time.

There is no efficiency that can ever be gained. It's a chart of value and lost energy forever extending up and to the right.

[TeMPOraL]

And in the world that's in a desperate need of both rethinking its energy usage and overhauling the energy sources, in a world in which everyone is politely asked to reduce their carbon footprint, this is the last thing we need - a platform for pure energy waste tied to unadulterated human greed. If I were an evil mastermind, worried that the world is escaping its doom by adopting clean energy too fast, this is what I would do.

[mintplant]

Sorry, no, you can't burn my CPU cycles and drain my battery for money. Full stop, end of story, thanks for playing, etc, etc. I still own my computer, and I couldn't care less about your innovative new business model. Just, no.

[phailhaus]

Yeah but you're not entitled to use their server's resources for free. If you're not okay with them running a miner while you use their site, don't use their site. I'm okay with this approach as long as they are transparent about it.

[TeMPOraL]

I am. That's literally how HTTP, and broadly the Internet, works.

If you want to put restrictions on how your site is meant to be used, use appropriate protocol means. Like, respond with 402, or simply don't serve content until I pay you / agree to display ads / agree to run your cryptocoin miners / whatever.

Ads, and sneaky cryptocoin mining scripts, are underhand attempts at having a cake and eating it too. Because they know people don't like to pay, they choose to pretend they're free, while at the same time bleeding the visitors for small amounts of indirect money (in attention => time, or computing resources => electricity).

[notheguyouthink]

> Because they know people don't like to pay, they choose to pretend they're free, while at the same time bleeding the visitors for small amounts of indirect money (in attention => time, or computing resources => electricity).

I mean... I get where you're coming from, and I agree that I don't like it either - but I'm curious what the "right" solution is.

I think it's clear that people, on average, hate to pay. They hate to let go of money, and will put up with a surprising amount of bullshit as long as they aren't giving someone else a cent. So what's the winning solution here? Your 402 example is wishful thinking at best, imo.

So far, the only thing I can imagine is some type of system that's built into internet providers. A monetary sharing scheme, based on traffic or viewing receipts, etc. Something to pass revenue via meaningful metrics, and not 402s (which i think are wishful) or crypto mining.

With that said, that seems difficult. Though I do wonder what will happen to these crypto models once they become popular. Suddenly farms will up the hash rate and lower income for site providers. A view will steadily decrease in revenue as hash rate goes up, which will seem to promote longer crypto times. They'll want you to read longer, or wait ~60s before turning to page 2, or etc. All to inch out some extra seconds of crypto time.

Weird world we live in.

[TeMPOraL]

Yes, people hate to pay. Like 'Eliezer said once, paying literally feels like losing hit points in a video game. Still, I think we should accept it.

My proposed solution is bit unpopular, but it goes like this: just have people pay actual money. Now, this would cause a lot of the present Internet to disappear, and I say good riddance. Here is why.

The Internet is mostly made of two kinds of people: 1) those who publish stuff pro bono, as a hobby or a service to their fellow Internet citizens, and 2) those who publish stuff in order to earn money. If we switched to ad-free, direct-payment-required Internet, here's what I believe would happen:

- People posting stuff pro bono will still post stuff pro bono, still paying the costs out of their own wallets. That content will mostly remain, and will remain free.

- Businesses that also publish something will start treating publishing as a marketing expense, and that content will also remain free.

- The rest of money-earners will try to switch to a subscription model. Those providing actual value will succeed, and people will pay for their publishing directly. As for the rest, there will be carnage, and they'll disappear from the Internet, no longer profitable. Because this literally affects the most worthless (from consumer's POV) kind of publishing, we'll all be better off without it, and the people involved will have an opportunity to find a more socially useful way of earning a living.

- The adtech industry will collapse, which would be a huge win for freedom and privacy on-line.

Now there's one bad side of this solution that comes to my mind: this privileges people with money to spare. Currently, even though we are drowning in sewage that masquerades as content, people without any spending money (like e.g. teenagers) can access disproportionately big amount of quality information (after they sift through the refuse, of course). I know I personally benefited from that when I was younger. I don't know how to handle this particular case; but overall, I still feel the tradeoff is worth it.

[monsieurbanana]

That's not an unpopular solution. Because it's not a solution at all.

What you just said: "Here's what I would do: I would make a perfect world. How? That's for you to figure out."

How would you get rid of ads? If you can't answer that, the best you can do is write a fiction book.

[notheguyouthink]

As an aside, I think newer p2p oriented technologies will slowly improve the "pro bono" culture. When we can all host a site with a good UX, easily, that can handle reddit level traffic for free.. the model changes a lot.

Tech like IPFS could make the world a very interesting place.

[phailhaus]

> Ads, and sneaky cryptocoin mining scripts, are underhand attempts at having a cake and eating it too

Like I already said, I'm fine with it if they're transparent about what they're doing. Miners should not run by default, they should get the user's permission first. If they refuse, don't serve the site.

[TeMPOraL]

Yes, we agree on that. If and only if they're transparent about the requirements, they can demand whatever they want. They're also free to back those requirements up with tech to get rid of the users who, as you called it, feel entitled anyway.

[wtallis]

> If you're not okay with them running a miner while you use their site, don't use their site.

The onus is on the site to not serve up content if they don't trust that I'm running their code as-is at full speed. Nothing about the design of the Web says that servers should trust unauthenticated clients or that clients should prioritize the server's wishes over those of the user. Server operators have no standing to complain when a user agent ignores the server's request for the user agent to do something that is against the user's interests.

[phailhaus]

Or I mean, you can just ask if the user is okay with the site running a miner, and if they refuse then don't serve the content. That's what I mean by transparency.

[wtallis]

That works, if you trust the user not to lie when they have every incentive to lie.

[phailhaus]

It's not possible for the user to lie since the miner has to report back to the server with the proof of work that they've done.

[TeMPOraL]

You can't; hence you should back it up with tech checking if the user is complying with your requirements.

[testestx]

Simply return an HTTP error code if your server doesn't want to spend resources with my request. HTTP 500 perhaps.

[adrianN]

HTTP 402 was made for this.

[cakedoggie]

Simply don't go to any website you don't control.

[wdr1]

It seems equivalent to ad blocking.

[phailhaus]

Yeah, and there are sites which will prevent you from viewing their content if you have an ad blocker enabled. That's their prerogative.

[BatFastard]

I would love to have the option to pay with CPU cycles so that I dont have to subscribe.

[xelxebar]

While I sort of share this sentiment, it fails to acknowledge that BC mining is potentially a better use of our CPU cycles than feeding morally dubious ad networks.

As long as someone is upfront about the whole thing, I would honestly not mind. It feels like an improvement over the current status quo.

In fact, since CPU cycles are so easy to give away, I'd probably end up doing so more readily than having to pull out my wallet and run through the hassle of registration and payment.

[kowdermeister]

Why do you care if your CPU goes 100% because of some shitty ad or some coin mining operation? Both is there because of profit generation.

[TeMPOraL]

Personally, I care about both of them, and see both of them as underhanded evil.

[flashman]

Website owners are free to attempt this business model. I am free to choose what code runs on my machine.

Every business model has trade-offs, and no model guarantees income.

[chii]

There's one model that guarantees income: the subscription model.

[timv]

Only if you can guarantee that someone subscribes.

[pdkl95]

You simply need to provide a product that has value. If nobody is subscribing, that might be a message that your product isn't actually worth anything.

[TeMPOraL]

That's exactly why ads are so popular on-line. With them, it's trivial to waste a bit of time of other people with shitty non-product, and earn some money in the process. The same thing wouldn't fly with subscriptions; you'd actually have to create something valuable.

[LaGrange]

Or people who would subscribe it are unable to afford the monetary cost. That doesn't mean it doesn't have value.

Wouldn't justify wasting energy and compromising user privacy, as the current model does, but that's why capitalism has to go.

[xg15]

> And what do I see here? That before it even started people are fighting it.

Seems to me, before it even started, people started abusing it. (e.g. by just keeping it running through the whole session)

If you want to invent some acceptable method of compensation for the web, you should make sure that both sides have power to negotiate a fair price.

With ads and tracking, it seems to be all or nothing: Either unreasonably high prices (perpetual tracking and potential malware for a 5 minute article) or unreasonably low (use an adblocker and get it free)

The "proof of work" payment method seems to have the same problem.

[whatusername]

Here was a HN post about it over 6 years ago. It's not new. (noting it was bitcoin and not something like Monero)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2566365

[partiallypro]

I'm not completely against it, so long as the content provider is transparent about it and as long as it is only active while I am browsing their site and isn't some malware like thing that turns my machine into a zombie. I feel like it would be easy to hijack and hide in a window process though so it just always runs when your browser is running. Even if Pirate Bay, et al doesn't do that...someone will or already has.

[IncRnd]

That's like saying that regular ad posters on the wall, when someone reads them, are okay to borrow your coat, shoes, and cell phone while you stay in that room.

[banku_brougham]

better than ads and trackers, i agree. but shortly we'll be getting all three.

[sametmax]

And this is why we can't have nice things.

[PhasmaFelis]

> We still have to figure out stuff like battery draining on mobile

"Figure out" how? If mining didn't eat lots of power and CPU cycles, it would be useless as proof-of-work and BitCoin couldn't exist. It is literally impossible to do useful amounts of mining in a way that doesn't slow down the mining device and drain its battery.

[narrowtux]

I don't know. If you run those on a laptop you pretty much kill battery life, same thing with phones.

[r3bl]

If HTML5's battery API ever became a thing, this issue could be solved without any user interaction.

[cpeterso]

I would not expect miners to voluntarily stop mining just because the user agent reports low battery. Any miners that care about mobile users could check the user agent string and throttle mining.

[TeMPOraL]

If the battery API ever becomes a thing, the first thing I will do is to hack the browser to perpetually report an almost-dying battery. Similarly, if there ever comes a standard for network link quality, I'll make my browser report I'm on a 56k modem.

The reason is simple: whatever cruft the site decides to only serve to high-end users is the cruft I'm very much not interested in seeing.

And because I'm definitely not alone in this thinking, those APIs will be failures for anything other than getting additional bits for tracking and profiling people.

[lagadu]

It'd be fine. You would do that, I would do that and most people here would do that. The vast majority of users would not, it's just like adblockers: only a minority uses them.

[wrinkl3]

Can you elaborate how?

[sergiotapia]

"is this user on a mobile device or laptop? Don't mine."

[wrinkl3]

Meh, then you're back to the same dilemma ads have: you have to convince the users to visit your page from a desktop PC as much as possible. And that usually means making the mobile experience as bad as possible. Which the users won't like for fairly obvious reasons.

[r3bl]

No, not even that.

More like: "Is this user's battery below 50% and discharging? If not, he'll probably not even notice this."

[xg15]

Why would a miner want to implement that?

[tentaTherapist]

So that people don't get angry?

[seanwilson]

Then users would just set their machine to say they're on a slow laptop with 1% battery left.

[jabot]

The gnu taler project might be a better solution, if it reaches adoption.

One use case that they have in their demo is micro payments to access web sites: https://demo.taler.net/en/

[BatFastard]

I agree that this is a possible solution to ads issues.

[outoftacos]

"Solution" wow, just step back a second here, I never signed up for advertisements AT ALL, much less background CPU miners for shady schemes.

Solution is the last word to use, there is no problem first off and malware is not how you would solve this fantasy of a "problem".

[phailhaus]

You have to remember that you're not entitled to their server resources. If you are not okay with a CPU miner, then don't use their site. I'm okay with this as long as they are 100% transparent about their monetization scheme.

[Nursie]

I'm pretty sure I'm entitled to request content, and my machine can render it however it likes.

They make the choice whether to serve it or not.

[phailhaus]

Yes, that's exactly what I've been saying. If the user refuses to run the miner, don't serve the content. It's the exact same with ad blockers.

[rootlocus]

> my machine can render it however it likes

The cost isn't what hardware does the most work. It's what time was spent creating the content. Of course they have the choice whether to serve it or not, but don't mistake the hours put into writing an article with the milliseconds used to serve a request. You're not (not) paying for the latter.

[Nursie]

What a strange argument, it's not about cost, it's about ownership. The creators own their content, the consumers own their hardware. Either is free to do what they wish with their piece.

[chii]

> don't use their site

Or, use their site, but the end user always dictate the code that runs on their own machine. If the server don't wish for a user to skimp the mining, make them submit the proof of work result first, then serve the content.

[TeMPOraL]

> You have to remember that you're not entitled to their server resources.

I am, to the extent their server responds to open protocols on the public Internet. It's up to them, not me, to configure what their server sends when. This is literally how the Internet works.

[phailhaus]

We're not disagreeing. Server makes it clear they want to run a miner, if the user refuses then don't serve the content.

[tentaTherapist]

If you give me code and I don't run it, I don't really think I'm at fault here. If this was opt-in maybe they'd receive more sympathy, but as it stands wasting my electricity to make them a fraction of a cent is a rather unwelcome surprise.

[lagadu]

If the server feels I'm not entitled to its resources, the server is welcome to respond with a 402 code.

[rootlocus]

> there is no problem first off and malware is not how you would solve this fantasy of a "problem".

If you think consuming content online without paying anything for it isn't a problem, you're wrong and it's not even debatable [1]. I'm not saying this is a good solution. I'm just pointing out it's not a "fantasy" of a problem.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq2_wSsDwkQ

[whipoodle]

> And what do I see here? That before it even started people are fighting it.

Ha, I really dig the implication that people are impetuous brats for not wanting this to run on their computers. The audacity..!