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.
I 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.
Comments
Hey 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.
I 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.
I'm interested in seeing the Bitcoin mining module. Would you mind putting that up on GitHub?
What sort of text mining could you do "profitably"?