[tmpmov]

You may find it less palatable, but I could totally see the 'free to play' games going down the road of cryptocurrency mining.

As your project did before, you could tie the mining with in game currency. If the underlying block chain is actively traded you could even scale the game currency with real currency in some way... 0.0001 cent is a gold coin for example. Payment that way would seem fairly above board, especially if you clearly tell the player about the taxing system -- this could then be your funding.

[piracy1]

I think most people would even prefer that to ads, I'd much rather have you utilize 30% of my CPU for a while than make me watch an ad.

[berkes]

On mobile that is bit more difficult. But even there: I'd rather have my battery drained by a clear, transparant miner than through spying and data-mining ads.

Though, in reality, I'd rather not have my battery drained at all; so I'd disable this when not plugged in. Or for desktop only.

[nonbel]

This exists and is called huntercoin. The hard part for the human mining is coming up with a game that bots are worse at than humans, so it is still under development: http://huntercoin.org/

Soon (next month or so) the same team are releasing a multi-game coin as well: https://chimaera.io/