Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by quackerhacker 4516 days ago
This is the first I've heard of Tidbit and I have to say that it is absolutely ingenious!!!

If they do open source the code, I strongly hope that webmasters would actually replace obtrusive ads with the mining protocol and not just add it in addition to ad revenue.

3 comments

It should be noted that their intent was to be purely opt-in. Stealing a user's CPU/GPU cycles is extremely bad form. (It's bad enough when ads/tracking code does it by accident.)
CPU bitcoin mining doesn't really do much. The idea is nice, but it would take way too long to be competitive as a form of revenue generation if all it had access to was the CPU.
i'm willing to wager it's possible to write a WebGL shader to mine bitcoins.
It's been posted before and quite frankly, it can very easily be abused as a malicious feature. Especially if the user is unaware of their being complicit in mining.