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Comment by thinkloop | Hacker News Reader

Like others have mentioned, the economics are not good, mining is too competitive to be done on commodity hardware. Consider that over half of browsing now happens on mobile, and it becomes clear that very few people can participate.

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That's not actually true - some coins are designed to be used on "commodity hardware". Monero is one, and it's what Coinbase uses.

Last I counted, my estimate on profitability was 0.006 cents / computer / minute.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/62m5mu/eli5_why_can...

In what way does Coinbase use Monero?

I think they meant Coinhive. https://coinhive.com

I'm sure they meant Coinhive, not Coinbase.

ya, thanks.

Monero's PoW relies on native AES instructions to be efficient on PCs with recent Intel/AMD CPUs, but remains very inefficient on mobile and older desktop CPUs.

Who cares if it's not economical on commodity hardware, be it a smartphone or not. If I have a website that is visited by enough people to mine me a (part of a) bitcoin, while at the same time the cost of hosting the site is less than what is earned, what does it matter if the mining power is not efficient? If I care more about money than about environment, it's a good business model. But you probably need a lot of visitors for that, and I have no idea if it works out.

mine me a (part of a) bitcoin,

To be clear, literally mining Bitcoin without specialized equipment is so wildly unprofitable to be an idiotic business model and that's obvious after five minutes of Googling.

Profitability doesn't matter if you're not paying costs but getting the income.

It does matter if you are: making pennies (Bitcoin on commodity machines is this way), are turning away users, or are using it instead of advertising.

There's also the bit about stability, you might have a business model that's profitable one month or worthless the next. Who wants that risk?

I believe the unprofitability is such that it can't even pay the expenses of serving the pages. Even if it could though, why would you opt for something that barely allows you to survive, rather than make a killing for all the value you are clearly providing?

They wouldn't be using Bitcoin, they'd use Monero.

It's free if it doesn't use your power though...

But it's not free when compared to advertising. Case in point, this article hypothesizes about botnets mining cryptocoins - but botnets are already frequently used to exploit advertising payment channels.

You could have a hundred billion smartphones mining Bitcoin via you website and you wouldn't make a single dollar from it.

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