Hey HN!<p>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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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.
Bear 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.<p>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.
Seriously? This idea was horrible back when Coinlab tried it in 2012 ( <a href="http://bitcoinmagazine.com/1086/bitcoin-mining-a-new-means-of-paying-for-video-games/" rel="nofollow">http://bitcoinmagazine.com/1086/bitcoin-mining-a-new-means-o...</a> ) and it's even more horrible now. At the very least mine Litecoin or Primecoin.
<i>20K hashes/client</i><p>ha, good luck with that<p>28nm asic miners are out and they do 600GH/sec at $4k + 1Watt/GHs<p>bitcoin is just about out of reach for normal people, we missed the train
Couldn't this be considered a malicious feature?<p>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?
This 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.
You would need 500,000 people mining on your site all the time to match one 10GH ASIC...<p>Any site that constantly has 500,000 active users would have server costs that dwarf any revenue this would bring.
This is not very new idea, I think this is first PoC I can find quickly: <a href="https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=166417.0" rel="nofollow">https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=166417.0</a><p>Given current network difficulty, this won't earn 0.000001 $ per impression (more exact calculations are needed)
Wow, 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.
If 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<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/jrHoaOV.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/jrHoaOV.png</a>
In 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 => <a href="http://nodeknockout.com/" rel="nofollow">http://nodeknockout.com/</a>
Aren'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.
This 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."<p>Mmm... Although if it's legit I'd use it, but only if it's open source.
Reminded me of the Unoceros team, and their SDK (currently in Alpha):
<a href="http://unoceros.com/" rel="nofollow">http://unoceros.com/</a><p>The idea is "make money with your phone, in the background."
related 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.