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Comment by flashman | Hacker News Reader

A classic of the genre: http://orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker/

And a place to find more: https://www.reddit.com/r/incremental_games

Is there any way that cookie clicker could have been farming CPU cycles? I remember playing it and thinking that it was consuming an awful lot of resources after a while...

I noticed the same performance hit. My impression was that it was graphically clunky and poorly written, but I can't prove that nothing sinister was going on.

A lot of these games run on using really large numbers. Would a poor implementation of a big int datatype perhaps be to blame for the performance hit?

It's entirely possible - there are e.g. bitcoin miners written in javascript.

But never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.

But none of those are viable anymore since asics.

They cost more to run in electricity than they generate, sure. But if it's the user's electricity, the person running it might not care. People still do CPU mining with stolen AWS servers even though CPU mining is inefficient.

>People still do CPU mining with stolen AWS servers even though CPU mining is inefficient.

I seriously doubt that. It's not just "inefficient", it's completely useless for bitcoin mining. It's something like spending $1000 in electricity to make a cent or two. It's not even worth the time to hack.

If you had that much cpu power under your control, you'd make more just selling it on darknet for 1% of its cost.

I don't think javascript miners would have ever been remotely viable

Well, you could look the source. I think last time I played most of it wasn't even minified.

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