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Comment by fennecfoxen | Hacker News Reader

Malware Bitcoin-miners, hmm? I don't like Skype as a vector... what if you could put it in the browser instead? Which leads me to a less malware-y idea: write a JavaScript/Flash/similar component that mines bitcoins in a web browser. Put it on your site instead of ads. Has anyone beat me to it?

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Mining bitcoin on a CPU these days is like digging for gold with a garden shovel. Once upon a time it may have worked, but today it's basically useless (even if you do it on a million computers at once).

WebGL FTW!

Wouldn't work. The right API calls aren't exposed. You would need something like webCL.

A long time ago I did some proof of concept work to do GPGPU operations in the browser with regular webGL, it kind of worked: http://learningwebgl.com/blog/?p=1828#comments

I did look into using the same technique to implement bitcoin mining in glsl. My opinion is that it is possible, but not straight forward and probably not worth it, but still a pretty f'ing cool concept.

All you need are shaders to do gpu computation.

People did GPGPU before the likes of OpenCL and CUDA.

well yes... just not from a browser.

Has anyone beat me to it?

Where BitCoin is concerned, the answer is always "yes".

That idea came, and went, two years back.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=9042.0

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2566365

That'd be an interesting advertising alternative that could be good for both parties. In exchange for content, you give the website X CPU cycles (or GPU I guess). It could be built into the browser so that you'd have really efficient mining techniques. Clients (with beefier computers) could choose to give more cycles to their favorite sites.

I'm not sure if you could provide comparable amounts of revenue. I guess time-spent-on-site would be the most important factor. At the current cost and difficulty of Bitcoins, you'd need 1,000 concurrent users on average all day all running at 10mhps to just make $92 per day. 10mhps seems like it's asking a lot, it'd probably drain a lot of batteries.

What if you were, say, Facebook, and had lots of visitors, good time-on-site metrics and you were still searching for ways to grow revenue? Might it make sense? Seems like their entire userbase could combine to mine quite a few bitcoins.. But I'm not a miner, so perhaps I'm wrong? A quick search turned up a Fast Company article that claims (http://www.fastcompany.com/3005269/facebooks-daily-mobile-us...) 618 million daily users. Assuming that most of those folks aren't logged on all day and many (more than half!) are logging on via mobile, you'd probably only be able to convert a fraction of those to effective miners, but even still it sounds like a lot of bitcoins per day. Perhaps they might offer users the option in exchange for better privacy controls and/or an ad-free experience?

Remember that the bitcoin network adjusts itself to try to only have about 25 bitcoin per 10 minutes mined. So if you were to jump into the pool with loads of cpu power you'd get a few bitcoin for a whole, then it'd adjust to be harder, raise the bar, and you're back with the same generation rate

Yes, but you'd be getting more of the pie. The pie remains the same size, granted, but you can still make quite a lot from owning a significant portion of the processing power.

A ton of companies have tried to monetize spare cpu cycles. The problem is that you can't do anything valuable with them. Most problems aren't trivially scalable, you have to assume malicious users so that means you need to essentially double efforts, and third parties aren't comfortable sending data through the system.

Too late xD

http://www.bitcoinplus.com/miner/embeddable

Once upon a time, when java applets were exciting, fresh, and new, I wrote an applet which calculated digits of PI and used CGI to post them to my server.

Visitors would watch animations, whilst I "stole" their CPU time.

That must have been 96/97 or so.

Yes, I think so, but it would probably be pointless by now, and many would notice.

Why do you think the browser would be a better vector than Skype?

I didn't say it's better. I just like it more.

plura?

Plura Processing pays affiliates up to $2.60 per full month of computing time provided(when they have customers).

I don't think it competes well with advertising.

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