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Comment by andreasklinger | Hacker News Reader

Is js via gpu (WebGL i assume) already efficient enough to make the concept of "computation time instead of banners" finally viable?

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This will never become a thing. If my phone heats up and dies after twenty minutes because the news site I'm reading is crunching numbers on my phone's GPU, I am (and most other folks on HN are) going to be VERY salty. Compute time on user machines isn't free, and users will notice.

On top of that, display advertising pays when the user sees the ad. Coin mining only pays when the user has completed enough useful work to send results back to the server. The odds of that happening for a huge number of websites are very low.

doesn't have to be 100% cpu calculations

I've never come across this concept before. What is it? Is it something like, to see the page content, you must have a key which is either time-consuming to compute, or is just given to you if you first view an ad?

Its the use of hashcash as money, instead of making users see ads.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

I would guess that some people imagine a business model for websites where the user pays with computational power. Using GPU would be a way to make this worthwhile.

the beginning of the end of adblock :(

Ad blocking will always work as long as: a) ad networks insist on having users connect to their servers and b) users have the ability to blacklist said servers.

If you treat it like proof-of-work system it's rather depending on c): Making sure that search engines can still index your content. Because if that is not a requirement it's actually rather trivial to defeat any ad blocker: pose a computational problem that takes x seconds to compute on average hardware. Show ad while computation is going on. Only serve content once client sends back the answer. Sure, blockers can still block the ad itself, but it will just make the user stare at a blank screen.. or more likely loose him forever ;).

One can always disable WebGL.

My point is it could enforce a waittime. Disabling webgl only makes it worse as you'd have to wait much longer for the solution.

Mine bitcoins, see content.

Unfortunately I don't see this option in Safari 11.0 ...

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