Ask HN: Bitcoin mining as an alternative to ad revenue
If you had a website, could it be feasible to pool all of the users hardware resources in order to fund the services?
Obviously this would depend on the type of service, etc, I’m just brainstorming.
The likelihood that one of your visitors mine one bitcoin is extremely low nowadays. If you work in a pool that doesn’t consist of only your visitors and their limited resources, you will get close to nothing.
Just go burn a few old tires outside. The environmental impact might be similar and you will save time.
Unless you already did, assume whatever the service is, the user is absolutely hooked on and can only use it via this transaction.
Would you still say the same?
Ads worked back in the era where people couldn't make payments online. These days it's just more effective to have them pay, or in some cases, pay to disable the ad.
Jeremy Rubin built a proof-of-concept for this over a decade ago for a hackathon and ended up being sued by the state of New Jersey. This blog post[0] has a good summary of the events.
[0] https://ethanzuckerman.com/2015/05/28/the-death-of-tidbit-an...
This guy even said as an alternative to ad-revenue, I felt so clever lol.
Crypto is much more known than when that occurred. Wouldn’t surprise me if something like this would still get sued though.
10 years ago μTorrent tried to package a crypto miner as an install path offer instead of a toolbar and faced incredible backlash.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%9CTorrent#Ads_and_malware
Ultimately just getting them to pay you bitcoin instead (over the lightning network) would be a better option for them as they can give you as much work/energy as you want independent of the capabilities of their device and electricity costs.
it's terribly inefficient. People tried this years ago and it was pretty quickly wiped of the web because people do not tolerate it.
"Mining agents as an ethical alternative to pervasive `ad` system" is considered more legally offensive than ads. Courts and media alike face great difficulty understanding ethics arguments, being left out and uninformed about the Web for too long.
I should’ve said, a method like this would require user consent. Not a lengthy terms and conditions that the user would inevitably ignore but something designed to be really in their face so they can’t use unless they’re well informed.
Could that still be considered unethical? Or is that just more in the air.
Great way to get your site blacklisted
That’s a good point. What if the mining was well addressed in advanced?
Great way to get your site blacklisted
Cool
no.