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Comment by frisco | Hacker News Reader

That's actually a very interesting use of Bitcoin: post-advertising monetization. Eyeballs are directly monetizable by mining, which of course continues even after all BTC has been "mined" via transaction fees. I've been working under the thesis that "programmable money" will be interesting even if I can't see the applications now for a while, and this is the first real use not possible with a traditional currency that clicks for me.

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It's been done, tried, and it wasn't practical back in 2011. Certainly not now that the network is easily a thousand times faster.

Seeing as electricity is not free, you're basically just reaching into their wallet in an extremely indirect and dishonest way.

However, that electricity gets converted into heat, so your heating bill gets reduced.

I have no heating bill, ever. Waste heat just makes my apartment more uncomfortable.

/cooling bill goes up

> However, that electricity gets converted into heat, so your heating bill gets reduced.

Do you really think heating a room with electricity is efficient? why do you think people use coal or gaz for that purpose ?

Edit : you are being sarcastic i hope.

Where did I imply that it was efficient? I was merely saying only looking at your electricity bill doesn't provide an accurate picture of the cost of mining.

Heating a room with electricity technically is very efficient, it's just not very cost efficient.

I'll remember that when it's 100 degrees outside.

If they don't tell about it, this is bad.

But I can imagine this to be a serious business model.

It's not really practical. The most your gpu time is worth is whatever it costs someone else to set up a gpu cluster and do the same thing a thousand times more. Those people will eventually drive the price down to barely above power costs. That happened to bitcoin.

Externalizing the cost onto the visitor could allow you to drive the costs past the cost of power and be ok, making it uneconomical for the GPU farm who pays their own way. I don't know how ASICs fit into this, but I see a bunch of ways to still end up in the model I described.

The problem is even high end ATI GPUs will only generate $.50 a day and that will only get lower as the network becomes after. Anything else generates less than $.05 a day which isn't worth it at all.

A network specifically for this could never be set up either as there is no incentive to pay for the GPU time except when it's directly performing something useful i.e. bitcoin mining.

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