Could cryptominers be the good alternative to ads?
Everyone hates ads. Frankly, no one wants to pay for anything online. And places like CoinHive offer a service that doesn't clutter the screen and pays people. Too good to be true right? Well the first group of people to latch on the service ramped up the mines to 8 threads at 100% because they were hackers and didn't care if they slowed your computer or drained your battery. They just wanted their almost untraceable money.
What I'm proposing is that if sites were to use miners that instead use 2/4 threads at 10% thereby using far less resources, across enough users provided your traffic is ok, could the results be tangible if we gave it a chance?
edit: I hate cryptocurrency but I was more trying to discuss the idea of getting paid for passive CPU usage more described in this comment by @spctrvl
Bitcoin alone, currently has a predicted annual output of 35,830kt of CO2. It burns about 73.12TWh of power. Realtime-ish Bitcoin power stats.
Those are not acceptable numbers they're insanely bad. It uses nearly the same amount of power as Austria. It's 0.33% of the entire world's power.
If cryptocurrency is to continue, it needs to become more environmentally friendly.
So no, I can't support a cryptominer. It doesn't just burn some of my power in exchange for user the website. The cost->value ratio doesn't add up, at all.
In the time a single transaction takes place on the Bitcoin blockchain, it's burned enough power to account for 28.6 of the average US households. Or, if we were to roughly cost it by comparing US power prices, the rough equivalent of $4690. Source for US power prices. (19.41c/KWh * 846Kwh * 28.6 households)
TL;DR: Using a cryptominer harms our environment significantly, costs more for both the consumer and the producer, but doesn't deliver as much to the producer as it costs the rest of the world.
The way I understand cryptocurrency (I basically don't), the whole point of it is it needing a lot of resources to compute, otherwise it would not be secure.
I only have one, half-assed counter-argument: If cryptocurrency would replace banks (a big "if"), would a cryptocurrency transaction take up more or less energy than the whole banking system needed to handle one now? I wouldn't even know where to begin to calculate this (you'd probably have to factor in human work, which makes it messy), but I could imagine that cryptocurrency is ultimately more efficient than the current banking apparatus needed to handle transactions.
This was a pretty good post (I always enjoy Preston Byrne's cryptocurrency articles) recently that goes into this a bit: https://prestonbyrne.com/2018/10/05/bitcoin_hippo/
Not... Quite... But... Kinda...
Proof-of-Work is known to work, but requires bonkers amounts of computation, which leads to insane graphs of power usage.
However, there are other methods actively being researched. The most promising, is called Proof-of-Stake.
Instead of relying on huge amounts of computation, it uses a deterministic algorithm. This means there is no block reward, as such, by rather miners are rewarded directly with the transaction fees. Which means it uses dramatically less power.
There is still computation, and distributed with high degrees of trust. However, there are different difficulties involved, such as forging of histories, that could be put in place by large-scale miners.
Ethereum proposed a protocol for punishing that kind of fraud, but eventually opted against it, instead moving towards a hybrid of Proof-of-Stake and Proof-of-Work, which would hopefully be a decent compromise.
So, yes, currently we do need a Proof-of-Work, but we don't need it to being doing most of the heavy lifting - instead it can be a smaller step of the process. How that hybridisation looks however... Is an unsolved problem, with several variations being actively studied.
I'm not an expert on the tech, but Iota and nano are second generation coins explicitly designed to be highly efficient.
Bitcoin is horribly inefficient though, no argument there. But that's because it was the first one and the guy who made it was more concerned with proving it could be done than doing it well.
But a basic fact of a crypto currency is it requires ever increasing energy consumption, never reaching a point where economies of scale would kick in — unlike a traditional currency. Like by design is can't ever some to that, it would become too susceptible to a 51% attack.
From the site showing bitcoin energy usage
Admittedly I have no idea if lota or nano use this proof of stake style, though that article makes it sound like their is still testing to be done to validate the idea.
Man this thread has really put me off crypto.
Unfortunately I don't know enough of the math and theory to really refute the 51% point. What I can say is that there are multiple large companies like Volkswagen and Fujitsu are working with Iota. If it was as simple as "no hashing, no security", surely they would have seen that before moving in.
Saying crypto as a whole is bad because bitcoin sucks is like saying computers are worthless because the first ones took up entire rooms.
Yeah I think you're right, spent another hour reading about Iota and types of consensus algorithms. Definitely seems like their are other valid options to the bitcoin proof of work. I like iotas approach of not having miners or coin rewards, the reward for processing a transaction is that your transaction will then get processed by others.
The power of 28.6 of the average US households over what period of time? How did you arrive at that figure?
Why are you multiplying it by the number of households? Also the site you linked to for the energy consumption of mining gets that figure by assuming that miners are paying 5c per kWh and working backwards from revenue.
It should be 5c/kWh * 846kWh = $42
That's two orders of magnitude less than what you said.
Most of the mining doesn't happen in the US. Most of it happens in China.
Edit: I also should reiterate that power use per transaction has little use as a metric since mining power is almost entirely fixed relative to the number of transactions. It's not people making transactions that are causing mining to use power, it's people giving cryptocurrency value by buying it.
I found this paragraph really interesting, from that energy stats page:
The whole point of mining is to produce unique blocks that are then used to record the transactions between the last block and this newly mined one.
You can't just dismiss the cost per transaction because that's the whole point of bitcoin. This whole convoluted system of mining exists because none of the miners 'trust' each-other to record transactions–it ensures there is no cheating.
From what I can tell it's an inevitable consequence of a cryptocurrency, randomly allotting blocks throughout a network has to requires an increasing amount of computer to find–it's the only way to ensure no one individual can gain total control of the network. See 51% attack.
Yes, mining is how transactions are confirmed, but it's also how new coins are created. Right now only about 1% of miners' revenue comes from transaction fees. 99% comes from new coins. So you have to consider not only the power per transaction, which is minimal, but the power per new coin, which is almost everything. Reducing the value of Bitcoin would have a much higher effect on how much power mining uses than reducing the number of transactions. That's why power per transaction is a bad metric. In the future when the rate of new coins drops and transaction fees take over as the primary way miners are paid, then we can talk about mining cost per transaction, but we aren't there yet.
But, could you ever walk back the hash difficulty? I'm just assuming that whatever the difficulty is of the last coin, it's going to have to stay at that. If you lower it, suddenly all big miners have a larger and larger percentage of the total hashing power, completely defeating the point of having it decentralised.
So while yeah when miners aren't making money form mining they still have all the hash power power already build and just sitting their, a well times 51% attack seems inevitable following a hashing difficulty drop.
Also kind of the whole point of climate change, is it requires immediate action, you can't start giving exceptions because at some point in the future it's all maybe going to be ok.
Besides what good is all this energy expenditure doing? Great now a bunch of massive mining facilities have a load of bitcoin, so what? Wealth would still be highly centralised, with little practical difference to the modern state of things. Why should the amount of megajoules and co2 expended continue to be the deciding factor for who gets wealth. It seems if it's an ideal we're chasing with crypto, surly there are better alternatives.
Cryptocurrency is an environmental disaster, I wouldn't support it for any reason. CPU mining rather than GPU or ASIC is even worse.
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Neither is the internet.
Ah yes and advertising generates SUCH a value. If I could replace pointless ads with a new crpyto that actually helps fund content creators, I'm all for at least exploring the idea.
How so?
I would like to see the numbers but I suspect internet advertising, on a "per captia" basis, is magnitudes better than cryptocurrency mining though.
Do you have any thoughts on how to make crypto mining less compute intensive than an advertisement?
You've essentially just restated the problem. Sure, a bloated ad might use as much processing power as a cryptominer (and might also be automatically blocked by browsers like Chrome), but it's hard to imagine how a cypominer could use less energy than a static ad (which is the type of ad an ad-block user might actually white list).
That'd make it ridiculously slow for PoW-based cryptocurrencies. And those are all about speed. Plus for the most part ads load and take effort then are static. Maybe a blip of activity every now and then to put them on rotation. If I've got hundreds of tabs open as I often do, and each and every one of them is constantly chewing on a tiny bit of power to mine crypto, that's still gonna add up to a lot of crypto and a lot of power and a lot of heat and a lot of battery drain.
Honestly if we're going down this route where many people give small amounts of money directly or almost directly, let's just go with something like Flattr or what Brave's doing. Save the extra electric bill and the battery and just give them the money you would have just burned away on electricity.
Okay If we're counting computing time of producing an ad are we also counting computing time it takes to develop the cryptocurrency scripts? Do you think any meaningful mining or revenue generation will happen in the nano/milli-seconds it would take to account for a text/image based ad? Most scripts right now hope that you will spend minutes on a site in order to leverage the compute power.
Yeah not to mention the back-end power requirements for making ads. Someone has to sit in a heated/cooled and electrically lit room using a computer, sending e-mails, making revisions etc. Offices use lots of power. In fact buildings use like 45% of all energy. Who's to say replacing that entire sector with servers isn't better?
Sorry i just realized the three comments I replied to in this thread are all yours. Didn't mean to blow you in particular up.
Exactly. In energy efficient design you can't just look at it in terms of first-order costs and reductions.
Yeah, bitcoin uses lots of power. But perhaps there is savings to be had in terms of not generating ads. For instance, to make an ad it has to be commissioned, designed, hosted, etc. These all take energy: used by the businesses buying and selling ads, the servers that make ads possible etc.
Just because bitcoin uses a lot of power doesn't mean its necessarily worse. For instance if digital advertising uses say, 1.5% of global power and replacing it with a well-designed crypto (not necessarily BTC) would double the cost of crpyto to .66% then that's a savings of about 1%.
To just put your foot down and so "I think this technology is yucky and won't support it for any reason" seems short sighted to me.
Journalists need to support themselves. I use an adblocker anyway. Why not try something else?
As for the "alternative to ads" part of the question, I really like Patreon, although I think the model could be pushed further. Almost all media on the internet seems to naturally strive towards a flat-rate subscription model. Netflix, Spotify, Games With Gold,... it acknowledges that the service of giving access to a big library is the actual value, not individual licenses. So I think this could be applied to newspapers or blogging as well. Basically, "this blog requires a SuperPayXYZ or QualiContent+ account to view", you subscribe to one of either and gain access to a large list of newspapers, blogs, etc, for a reasonable monthly fee. Maybe compensation based on user rating, how many articles read or similar (I don't know how to solve the clickbait problem, though).
It seems almost inevitable to me but it would need a convincing group of publishers to jump onto it to work. A few services like this are already available but I always forget their name and their portfolio doesn't seem to be that impressive yet. I'm just afraid that Patreon is still too much of a barrier for supporting a large group of interesting websites and content creators, people consume so much fragmented content on the internet.
Flattr and Bave Payments are kind of like this, but pay-what-you-want instead of flat-fee. You set a monthly budget, which is split between the web sites you visit based on how much time you spend on each of them.
Cryptomining is preferable to ads in my opinion, but what would be even better is if there was a more general purpose distributed computing platform that you could implement in a similar way, so that visitors' processing power would be used for something other than the mathematical equivalent of masturbation.
Yep, there are other projects than just cryptocurrency networks that could use our CPU power. Projects like Folding@home and SETI@home comes to mind.
I can't find a source right now, but I think I read somewhere that the Ethereum network can actually do this type of distributed computing, in which case the ones commissioning the work pays those who contribute their machine power with Ethereum tokens.
edit:
SETI@home is actually based on BOINC, which @PetitPrince mentions in his comment. There's a good number of projects using BOINC, but I'm not sure if it's possible to implement rewards for those contributing computing power.
The Wikipedia article for Ethereum explains a bit about the Ethereum Vitrual Machine, as well as the smart contracts and applications running on it.
this is much more along the point I was trying to make. I wish I explained the question better. Tbh, I hate cryptocurrency.
Something like BOINC then?
Make as much of the site text-only and static as possible. It costs virtually pennies to host a static text based website even if you're getting thousands of hits a day.
Off-load the heavy content to hosts that will do it for free, e.g., videos can go on youtube/vimeo/peertube/etc
CDN hosting for images can be relatively cheap, free even, if you don't have a huge number of hits.
Patreon-like services are a great way to fund operations if you have a large enough and passionate following.
I will unblock cryptomining scripts when you pry my blocking extension from my cold dead fingers.
I host plenty of websites for free. But living isn't free. I hate cryptocurrency and this comment is much more along the point I was trying to make.
My alternative to ads is having a day job. Admittedly, this is a non-starter for websites run by businesses for the express purpose of making a profit, but that's fine with me. I'd just as soon see corporations abandon the web so that it can be de-commercialized and reclaimed by non-profit and non-government organizations, universities, libraries, and individuals putting up personal websites at their own expense.
non-profit, doesn't mean no-income. I was trying to brainstorm ideas for making non profit websites self sustainable financially.
Assuming that it manages to make money while simultaneously remaining user friendly (requires explicit opt-in, doesn’t destroy my CPU), then I’d be fine with it. The only problem would be the possibility of the consent popups being blocked by Adblock annoyances filter lists, much like GDPR notices.