This is pretty hilarious. Given how small the load can be to automatically contribute hashes to a pool for ___coin, I expect more of these in the future, but smarter. Runs for 5 seconds per minute on ten million devices for six months? That's no joke with some of the hardware out there.<p>It's <i>this</i> close to a victimless crime (that is, unless the victim gets their CPU/GPU fried, as has happened with these nets before). But what about apps that use spare cycles while you're plugged in, or above 75% battery, or between hours x and y, to mine dogecoins for charity? People would voluntarily submit to that!
This is alarmingly similar to the ESEA situation where ESEA (a premium membership gaming community) discreetly built a bitcoin miner into their anti-cheat client [1], fried some users' graphics cards and were found out then fined $1MM. [2]<p>[1] <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/2/4292672/esea-gaming-network-bitcoin-botnet" rel="nofollow">http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/2/4292672/esea-gaming-network...</a>
[2] <a href="http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/11/e-sports/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/11/e-sports/</a>
This could be an interesting model to do out in the open. Rather than covertly mine cryptocurrency, say that the app is free if you contribute hashes to a pool, or you can buy the premium version that doesn't.<p>Almost like the "slow" version vs the "fast" version of an app.
<shameless plug><p>I've been working on an idea similar to this for a few months. Instead of limiting this to crypto currency mining (a fair application, FWIW), why not approach this with the idea that people plugging in their phones every night could easily constitute the <i>largest</i> distributed supercomputer ever built? Everyone has the same nightly ritual: Wake up, use phone/tablet/device, plug in at night. Once it's plugged in, your phone charges to 100% after a few hours, and then essentially sits there for x hours effectively doing nothing (that's a little sensationalist, but it highlights my point). Folding@Home, et al have done this before, but the silver bullet here is that no one turns off their phone when it charges at night - perhaps to maintain the off chance they receive a random 4 AM phone call.<p>Now if you can combine this with an SDK (say... something Javascript based) that makes it easy to write/deploy compute jobs/"apps", you have a real distributed computing platform. You can also maintain security by using a similar proof-of-work scheme that bitcoin uses to prevent fraudulent mining.<p>The real challenge here is incentivizing people to run your app. Here's my sign up form for an early private beta for anyone who is interested.<p><a href="http://stynt.co" rel="nofollow">http://stynt.co</a>
These schemes mostly just convert electricity to cryptocurrency. The electricity is almost always more expensive than the value, but the app authors aren't paying the bill.<p>If you're plugging in your 5W charger for less than half the day, the limit is maybe $2/year/user, assuming you can get away with it for a year...
I think what surprises me most about this situation is that even though the supposed offending apps, Songs in particular has been downloaded and installed between one and five million times but only possibly generated the author a few thousand Dogecoin. Seems like a big risk for a few dollars, wouldn't advertisements be more profitable option?
I wonder how viable doing this openly would be as a free-to-play business model? Being upfront with the user: "we're not going to show you any ads and you won't have to pay anything for extra content, but we'll be using a tiny proportion of your CPU time to mine cryptocurrency to pay for the development costs of this app."
Careful.. The New Jersey DA is trying to go after an MIT student for simply exploring the freemium mining concept at a hackathon. He got MIT and the EFF to back him, but there are probably others looking to make an example out of someone.<p><a href="http://venturebeat.com/2014/02/12/new-jersey-slaps-mit-bitcoin-hackers-with-subpoena-and-theyre-fighting-back/" rel="nofollow">http://venturebeat.com/2014/02/12/new-jersey-slaps-mit-bitco...</a>
I wonder if one could create a pyramid scheme app out of this? An invite only one.<p>1st guy - 100% mining load & all profit.<p>2nd and 3rd guy split the mining load and 99.99% of the profit.<p>and so on...
I wonder if the new mobile GPU's are any good at mining scrypt-based currencies. It's possible that this could be fairly profitable. I don't think that long term this is going to replace ads though. Cryptocurrencies are too volatile at this point and I'd wager that ads are going to continue being much more profitable.
I had this as a day dream a month ago. Though it would work as in-app currency that I would give to the users and the servers / aws bill would be subsidized by the collective micromining.
This is why the permissions model needs to be improved - not just to deny/grant normal ones, but also to stop apps from unexpectedly running in the background.