Ask HN: Bitcoin mining as an alternative to ad revenue

3•pipeline_peak•8h ago

If you had a website, could it be feasible to pool all of the users hardware resources in order to fund the services?

Obviously this would depend on the type of service, etc, I’m just brainstorming.

Comments

colesantiago•8h ago

no.

dtgm92•8h ago

Great way to get your site blacklisted

pipeline_peak•7h ago

That’s a good point. What if the mining was well addressed in advanced?

solardev•2h ago

Great way to get your site blacklisted

pipeline_peak•2h ago

Cool

dmlittle•7h ago

Jeremy Rubin built a proof-of-concept for this over a decade ago for a hackathon and ended up being sued by the state of New Jersey. This blog post[0] has a good summary of the events.

[0] https://ethanzuckerman.com/2015/05/28/the-death-of-tidbit-an...

pipeline_peak•5h ago

This guy even said as an alternative to ad-revenue, I felt so clever lol.

Crypto is much more known than when that occurred. Wouldn’t surprise me if something like this would still get sued though.

numpad0•6h ago

"Mining agents as an ethical alternative to pervasive `ad` system" is considered more legally offensive than ads. Courts and media alike face great difficulty understanding ethics arguments, being left out and uninformed about the Web for too long.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptojacking

pipeline_peak•5h ago

I should’ve said, a method like this would require user consent. Not a lengthy terms and conditions that the user would inevitably ignore but something designed to be really in their face so they can’t use unless they’re well informed.

Could that still be considered unethical? Or is that just more in the air.

JamesLeonis•6h ago

10 years ago μTorrent tried to package a crypto miner as an install path offer instead of a toolbar and faced incredible backlash.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%9CTorrent#Ads_and_malware

speedgoose•3h ago

The likelihood that one of your visitors mine one bitcoin is extremely low nowadays. If you work in a pool that doesn’t consist of only your visitors and their limited resources, you will get close to nothing.

Just go burn a few old tires outside. The environmental impact might be similar and you will save time.

pipeline_peak•1h ago

Unless you already did, assume whatever the service is, the user is absolutely hooked on and can only use it via this transaction.

Would you still say the same?

detaro•2h ago

it's terribly inefficient. People tried this years ago and it was pretty quickly wiped of the web because people do not tolerate it.

Docker Docs: Bake

Import Death; Die

New Material Gives Copper Superalloy-Like Strength

Show HN: I'm building a better way to track ad performance across platforms

Automated Stock Technical Analysis with Rhombus AI

Amateur Athletes Are Turning to Ozempic to Raise Their Game

Is open-world design making games worse, or am I just getting old?

Many Cultures Borrow. Japan Transforms

Tokyo Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel

What Gen Z's Tumblr revival may tell us about the future of social networks

'Going to the cloud' could also mean locking into a forever sub-contractor

New APNIC director general steps up to steer the internet for 4B users

In Memoriam: SF and Fine Artist David Schleinkofer

More than one million readers

"The last couple GPT-4o updates have made it too sycophant-y, working on fixes"

The Valley of My Dreams: Why Silicon Valley Left Boston's Route 128 in the Dust

Restoring a Sinclair C5

Step1X-Edit: SOTA image editing model (alternative to GPT-4o)

My Notes on CRAQ – Chain Replication with Apportioned Queries

Agentic File Explorer

Re.green and Microsoft

Show HN: I Made a tool to turn your waitlist into a viral referral game

From HyperCard to Vibe Coding

Wikipedia: Sandbox

OpenAI o4-mini is Rainbolt-level Geogussr

Competing theory to 'dark energy' suggests the universe has different time zones

Microsoft says it will buy 8M tons of carbon offsets (2024)

What's on my Home Server 2025 – NixOS Edition [video]

What Healthcare Has Learned About Risk and Incentives that Marketing Hasn’t

Cloud Backed SQLite