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Tidbit: Client-Side Bitcoin Mining
- the-kenny 13y agoYou can be sure that no one with a computer running on a battery will ever visit your website again...
- mey 13y agoEven more so now that Android and OSX indicate at the application level what is impacting system battery.
- nathas 13y agoThis seems real scary. "Give us your wallet address, email, and a password, then let us run a bitcoin miner for everyone that hits your page that may magically cash out any where." Mmm... Although if it's legit I'd use it, but only if it's open source.
- simlevesque 13y agoJust make a bitcoin wallet for this sole purpose, if they steal it then it won't be that bad.
- Ihmahr 13y agoSo how many live clients would you need to mine 0.1 bc/day?
- Scaevolus 13y ago5 million, given present work factor and 20khashes/s per client.
- xSwag 13y agoFor what time duration?
- veemjeem 13y ago1 day? I think it was mentioned in OP in the form of 0.1bc/day. If someone big like cnn.com integrates this js code, you might make $20 a day. I still think adsense has better pay with that many viewers. One would need 5 million visitors to stay on your site for 24 hours. There are very few websites where people do that... maybe facebook/gmail.
- vbuterin 13y agoSeriously? This idea was horrible back when Coinlab tried it in 2012 ( http://bitcoinmagazine.com/1086/bitcoin-mining-a-new-means-of-paying-for-video-games/ http://bitcoinmagazine.com/1086/bitcoin-mining-a-new-means-o... ) and it's even more horrible now. At the very least mine Litecoin or Primecoin.
- possibilistic 13y agoHow do the various cryptocurrencies compare? There appear to be quite a few of them [1,2]. Are BTC, Litecoin, and Primecoin the best/most popular? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cryptocurrencies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cryptocurrencies [2] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/List_of_alternative_cryptocurrencies https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/List_of_alternative_cryptocurrenc...
- andrewla 13y agohttp://coinmarketcap.com/ http://coinmarketcap.com/ has estimates of market capitalization based on exchanges for various cryptocurrencies. A reasonable proxy for popular in some cases.
- dmix 13y agoLitecoin is #2 but when you click the bottom link "Looking for Ripple?", Ripple is #2. Ripple/Opencoin has 10x the market cap of Litecoin: http://coinmarketcap.com/ripple.html http://coinmarketcap.com/ripple.html But Ripple isn't a typical open source "crypto-currency". It's well financed and backed by big SF investors with the intention of making the founders/investors money, instead of miners, as the currency scales in price.
- meowface 13y agoLast I checked, Litecoin was the only alternative currency that's been gaining serious traction over time.
- Buge 13y agoThe reason to mine Litecoin in this context is because the algorithm (scrypt) hasn't been taken over by ASICs yet. So CPUs have a smaller disadvantage.
- wlk 13y agoThis is not very new idea, I think this is first PoC I can find quickly: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=166417.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=166417.0 Given current network difficulty, this won't earn 0.000001 $ per impression (more exact calculations are needed)
- mmagin 13y agoNow that's an efficient use of CPUs!
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- mistercow 13y agoAren't we well past the point where bitcoin mining on general purpose hardware costs more in energy usage than you earn by mining? I don't think that a model that has you earning less for viewing your site than the power company is going to be viable.
- teraflop 13y agoWe're long past the point where mining on a GPU makes economic sense, and this thing is roughly 1/10,000 as energy-efficient as a GPU.
- ck2 13y ago20K hashes/client ha, good luck with that 28nm asic miners are out and they do 600GH/sec at $4k + 1Watt/GHs bitcoin is just about out of reach for normal people, we missed the train
- possibilistic 13y agoI'm only casually familiar with ASIC mining, but I do recall hearing that the best position to be in is selling tools to the miners. Still, I'm curious; how much would you have to invest into modern mining hardware in order to see a return on investment? I'm going to assume you either need a lot of these or have to join a pool. Is this a game only playable by those with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars?
- TylerE 13y agoIf you don't already have hardware in your hands it is unlikely to be profitable.
- wmf 13y agoIf a thousand ASICs are profitable then one ASIC should also be profitable. The problem today is not scale but finding any profitable ASIC.
- Retric 13y agoAssuming your payoff for that 4k is 3 months ignoring energy costs... 600 * 1000 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 30 * 3 / 4000 = 1166400000 thousand hashes per dollar. If the average person spent 60 at 20,000 Hashes seconds on your site you would need 972,000 people to connect to make a dollar... ouch.
- axus 13y agoAnd more hashing power is coming online all the time. Here's a link to long-term plots of the difficulty and reward for Bitcoin mining: http://www.blockchained.com/chart_large_log.png http://www.blockchained.com/chart_large_log.png
- 13y ago
- vezzy-fnord 13y agoCouldn't this be considered a malicious feature? The site offers virtually no information, so is the user notified that their machine is being used as part of a mining effort, or does it occur silently in the background?
- jlrubin 13y agoHey HN! I'm Jeremy, one of the devs of this hackathon project. Thanks for checking this out, glad to see the community has interest in it. We made this project for NodeKnockout, and did not intend for it to be posted on HN. In the current release, we have a couple of things blocked out for various reasons (legal, ethical, etc) so that it is not 100% functional. We are very well aware that our current hashrate is pretty impractical. However, there are a number of optimizations we plan to implement to greatly improve this, including using WebGL. The problem that we're looking at starts with bitcoin, but we're also looking at more general purpose computing in the client too (ie, text mining). And in terms of battery life, yes, it does run up the cpu a bit. However, for certain users (ie, desktop), spare processor cycles could be more worth it than seeing ads. Web services using tidbit could make it an opt in thing for desktop clients.
- Avalaxy 13y agoI really like this idea actually. If the performance would be (a lot) better, it could be a very nice alternative to advertising. Everyone who visits your website would 'pay' you with some CPU/GPU cycles, and in trade for that you give them a web page that's completely rid of advertising, third-party tracking cookies, and other stuff that users find annoying. Personally I think advertising has been dying for years now, especially with all the adblockers that become more and more popular. It's time to come up with an alternative business model for websites (no, not talking about SaaS here..). What's your share in this? You take a certain percentage of the mined coins? Too bad mining is becoming more and more difficult, meaning that you will earn less and less.
- rpicard 13y agoI'm interested in seeing the Bitcoin mining module. Would you mind putting that up on GitHub?
- syllogism 13y agoWhat sort of text mining could you do "profitably"?
- joliv 13y agoWow, this is scary. I guess as long as it's EXTREMELY visible that someone were using up my CPU to make them money, I'd be alright with it, but otherwise, I would see this as blatant malware.
- loourr 13y agoThis should be converted to litecoin, maybe then it would make some money. 1000 KH/s ~0.8 LTC/day so with 50 users all day you would make $4 * 0.8 = $3.2 and if you had a million users it would be worth 64K/day assuming you could get the same hash rates.
- nadaviv 13y ago> assuming you could get the same hash rates You won't. Litecoin's scrypt is (purposely) much slower.
- loourr 13y agowell even assuming it was two orders of magnitude less then bitcoin, it would still be $640/day which is a good improvement over bitcoin. Based on this, that seems to be about the actual difference. https://litecoin.info/Comparison_between_Litecoin_and_Bitcoin#Differences_in_hashing_algorithms https://litecoin.info/Comparison_between_Litecoin_and_Bitcoi...
- nikoftime 13y agoReminded me of the Unoceros team, and their SDK (currently in Alpha): http://unoceros.com/ http://unoceros.com/ The idea is "make money with your phone, in the background."
- sofocles 13y agoIn fact, I'm testing it now and the indicator "connected clients" does not rise above 0. Probably, not even works. This is an experiment for a contest => http://nodeknockout.com/ http://nodeknockout.com/
- ezstar 13y agoSame here, would like to give it a try at least
- gesman 13y agoThis will bring to your business $0.0001 /per month. Or less. Sign up here....
- trishume 13y agoYou would need 500,000 people mining on your site all the time to match one 10GH ASIC... Any site that constantly has 500,000 active users would have server costs that dwarf any revenue this would bring.
- fbpcm 13y ago24 million hours at 20KH/sec nets you $6.80 at current difficulty and price.
- mkramlich 13y agorelated to the article's topic: anyone with a major interest in the security/robustness of Bitcoin miners, please contact me. email in my profile here.
- nwh 13y agoBear in mind that this will net the creator a few cents a day (if that even), and burn thousands of dollars in power for their clients. This wasn't economical in 2011 and it's sure as hell not economical now. I'd be pretty pissed off is websites started eating my CPU and battery just to make such a pitiful amount of revenue. To put this in perspective, for $5 you can buy a USB ASIC miner that will do 335MH/s, worth tens of thousands of full time JavaScript clients.
- knodi 13y ago20k hash rate is too low, even with 20k live clients.
- ezstar 13y agoIf they could somehow get a hold of the GPU and you had the equivalent of 10 decent gaming PCs connected at all times you'd get a little over $450 a year by my lazy calculations http://i.imgur.com/jrHoaOV.png http://i.imgur.com/jrHoaOV.png