Hey, here's an idea. Ethical cryptocurrency mining Adblock.

We've been talking a lot about mining as a revenue source and its ethics here, so that gave me an idea.

I've seen a lot of talk about blocking or boycotting mining websites.
Adblock has the "ethical ads" thing to allow reasonable ads to be displayed.

What if we made the mining equivalent of that: an extension that the user allows to mine with x resources, that prevents websites from doing their own mining, but which redistributes its mining results.

The website could just add a bit of script to tell the extension who they are, and while the page is on the foreground or streaming content, the extension would mine on their behalf.

This could also allow more transparency for the user: "your computer has generated x money for website y".

Wouldn't that be a nice middle ground? Does anyone know of a project like that?

So you would have to install extension on your browser in order to get reasonable mining done as payment for browsing website? So if I have 10 tabs open with different sites, do they all get 10% cut or does this extension track what I'm browsing and decides who gets coins?

I think I'll just stay with Adblock and don't browse sites that block content from me. My PC isn't really that efficient at mining and I'll rather pay premium instead of higher electricity bills and inconvenience that comes with higher load on PC (possible battery drain among them).

Besides, isn't cryptocurrency waste of resources the longer it goes? Like isn't printing money cheaper than mining bitcoin at the moment?

It sounds more ethical, at least, I think so.

@paziek
You have a point about dividing the resources, but that could easily be avoided by simply only mining in the current tab.
You said that mining is worse than printing money? It depends on how many users you have, for instance Reddit and Google would make quite a lot of 💰.

While yes, mining is becoming harder, but it is harder because computers are getting better. It's a currency regulated by computing power. It quite clever actually.

I think this is a much better middle ground, adblockers stop all standard kinds of income for the website. So mining would mean no ads, but the website still gets it's 💰.

I especially like the idea of showing the user how much they have contributed to a specific website.

It feels like a cleaner solution to ads. Of course ads won't disappear from the internet completely.

Maybe it would be possible to sync the mining to the power of the PC? It would be open to spoofing though.

- thoughts?

@paziek Well the goal is a more ethical revenue model. Currently, it's basically a war between the devs trying to get revenue and the users trying not to be inconvenienced by that.

Adblock is necessary for a comfortable experience in my opinion. Ads have become too invasive in my opinion, and a lot of them actively try to sneak malware in. For me, ads that don't follow Adblock's "ethical ads" should disappear.

But then how do websites get money? Let's be honest, everyone says they'd rather pay a premium to not have ads, but they just use Adblock, for free, because why wouldn't they?

Cryptocurrency mining is a revenue stream that websites are starting to exploit, and some of them aren't even courteous about it and will just milk your CPU as much as they can. This needs to be regulated somewhat. So the idea is to block mining, but allow a revenue stream by having the site just say "please mine for me" and having the extension do it.

@CptFox This convinced me, I'd use it. I like this idea more than ads.

@coolq "sync the mining to the power of the pc" ? Sorry, I'm not sure I understood what you meant by that.

Do you mean allowing the user to create profiles? Like "inactive, feel free to eat my CPU", "gaming, leave out computer alone for now", "middle ground: sure, have 10% of my computing resources, but I need the rest".

For me, the main challenge seems to be mining script detection, but I have a few guesses as to how to do that. Because if websites can still mine "the evil way" even with the extension on, it loses a bit of its purpose.

Sorry, I was a bit vague. I meant, almost what you said. If the PC can't handle the stress, it lowers the mining power automatically. However I could imagine that this would be easily spoofed, or it would give inconsistent income to the websites.

You could profile the page, if the load is too much, then it is considered mining and the extension won't mine for it? Or you could have a time based mechanism. How long has the script been running? This does mean things like YT won't work, as JS needs to run constantly. Alternatively, you could have a blacklist, or an accepted list?

Maybe you could blacklist specific script that have been flagged as 'mining' scripts? You said you had a few ideas already, did these help?

If you wanted to entice users to use their CPU completely, you could give them some of the income, but this could be falling into the trap other services have.

@DLMousey Well, the point is to give sites a more ethical source of revenue. Otherwise, the cryptocurrency mining will go completely out of control and most users will be poorly impacted. Trying to kill the hidden CPU hogging in the egg, but without killing what seems to me as a nice way for devs to get revenue without annoying the users so much.