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Comment by dkarl | Hacker News Reader

This is everything I wanted from micropayments. Please, take my money rather than forcibly taking my attention and shoving garbage through my brain. Too bad it has to waste electricity, but at least it's not abusing my poor, finite, distractible, distortable brain. It's not precious to anyone else, but it's precious to me.

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Is it really everything you want? Because one thing that I can imagine wanting with micropayments is transparency about how much you are paying...

You can control how much is "spent" with with a cap on CPU utilization.

I'm not sure if that would slow the page down and make it unusable though. Prioritizing non-mining activity seems like it might be trickier than simply capping processor usage.

Although it's not quite the same thing, it makes me think of how bandwidth heavy pages are now. Once upon a time, I browsed the web on 56K, or even 14.4K. Now, when my phone gets throttled to 128K many sites are unbearable.

My phone is currently throttled to 8kB/s. The only thing I can read is Hackernews; this is a well-built site.

Reminds me of google web lite. Its used on slow mobile connections from google search in some countries. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6211428?hl=en

CNN Lite comes to mind.

https://lite.cnn.io/en

Browsers do not provide such caps for JS CPU usage. Maybe they should.

This is extra bad when you're viewing on a phone, tablet or battery powered laptop.

If this problem persists, we will see tools popping up that use the OS APIs for restricting resource usage (e.g. cgroups on Linux) when starting the browser.

All it needs is faking the available computing power to any process created by the browser, or run it into a VM with extremely limited resources.

Not everything. But having this appear out of nowhere after years of waiting for micropayments for journalism is enough to make me gush like that.

Check out brave and brave payments.

The top Google result for them seems to be a broken page. https://www.brave.com/blog/introducing-brave-payments/

Try this link: https://www.brave.com/publishers/

I'd rather pay 10 cents than waste 20 cents in electricity. There just isn't good way to really do that easily and transparently.

Half-baked thoughts here, but the way I thought of it is you'd "top-up" your browser with say $10 a month and it would be distributed to sites you've viewed or chosen to donate to. There's obvious questions with privacy though and sites trying to game the system if it's view count based. I think most people wouldn't be against a small monthly payment to avoid seeing ads but you'd need to do it in a way that was simple and transparent that didn't require lots of work per site.

The distribution system you're describing is: https://flattr.com/

Brave Browser & Basic Attention Token (BAT) seems to have more traction: https://brave.com/creators/

Nobody wants to have am account you have to top up. You need to plan ahead, there would be multiple systems not completely overlapping (or some sites being cheaper with a specific billing company), and a myriad of other reasons. You would need to sequester multiple monies, and some you might ever use like having $3.12 left on a gift card, but multiple cards.

This is the Flattr model https://flattr.com/ that they recently moved to. I wish they moved to this model years ago, but I guess it was too soon for the time.

https://github.com/priestc/Autotip

was nice back in days when fee was low

Check out the Brave browser and Google Contributor.

Sure, but we've been waiting for micropayments for 20+ years. No exaggeration. The infrastructure isnt there. Cryptocurrencies have some infrastructure already. I'll pay the electricity tax if I can reward good content and not have ads.

If this catches on it might spur alternate and less wasteful solutions, but until then I've been all for this.

> Too bad it has to waste electricity...

It doesn't waste electricity. It uses a lot of electricity to create a secure global payment network that can solve the micropayments problem. Sacrificing efficiency for decentralization was a key design decision in Bitcoin.

YouTube cat videos and daytime television are genuine wastes of power. Humanity has to solve the power generation problem and processors are already far more power efficient than they were.

Cat videos and daytime television waste less power while providing much more value.

Ultimately cryptocurrencies have some value offering, but it's of dubious utility, because you can get 99% there with a little bit of trust, and then you don't have to pay this humongous upkeep in electricity.

Popularity of cryptocurrencies is almost entirely driven by greed, so it obscures the actual value of blockchain tech.

Keep it in mind that Proof of Work is necessary for this initial world of decentralized trust to be created, but after that, it is not necessary. Nearly all the other cryptocurrencies can bootstrap themselves using bitcoin and following Proof of Stake or some other non-PoW algorithm.

Even if Bitcoin dies, we still don't need to bring PoW again.

You're technically correct in that it does provide some value, but it is a waste in the sense that it is CPU mining which is far less efficient than mining with GPUS or ASICS.

There are proof of work algorithms that try to be ASIC-proof. And most visitors already have a CPU and GPU sitting idle. Something that used an extra 25% of your processors may not even be noticeable, and yet it could solve the fake news and clickbait problems.

Clickbait and fake news are not solely driven by advertising revenue so even if idle CPU and GPU had zero marginal cost crypto would not eliminate them. On top of that utilizing idle capacity is not free. The cost associated with crypto algorithms is real and must be evaluated in the context of what else could be done with the energy and compute resources. It’s not clear to me that crypto is the best use of our resources.

Is there a way to be ASIC-proof without being less efficient? I'm not 100% familiar with it, but my base level understanding was that you are adding more work (e.g. memory access) to nullify the raw compute advantage of ASICs.

Further, I'm not sure how it would solve clickbait. Surely clickbait => more clicks => more people running your miner (just as it currently leads to more ad. views)?

The thing is, finding a nonce that with given payload gives a hash ending with predefined number of zero bits has only one purpose: so everybody is very slow in computing it, but everybody is very fast in verifying. You can trade it for any other difficult problem that's easy to verify (anything NP-complete will do, assuming P != NP), you just need to find encoding that maps a payload into a problem instance.

In other words, you could replace proof of work with finding the largest clique in a graph, and try doing that in ASIC.

But the way crypto has ended up, big pools are sacrificing efficiency for (some) centralisation.

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