Ask Slashdot: Would You Accept 'Bitcoin-Ware' Apps? 232
After the E-Sports Entertainment Association admitted to sneaking Bitcoin-mining code into its client software, an anonymous reader writes "I thought that could have been a pretty clever idea, if it was made clear to the users that they could get the app and run it for free as long as, let's say, they accept that it would be run for Bitcoin mining for five hours a week, when their computer is idle. That could make a lot of profit for the developers if their app is truly successful, and without the users having to pay much (only a limited number of hours per week, and if the user is no longer running the app then it won't try to mine anymore). What do you think about this?"
Only if the source code is included (Score:5, Insightful)
So that I can remove the Bitcoin bits.
So It's An Indirect Intangible Gamble? (Score:5, Insightful)
An interesting idea and definitely one for the mathematicians but simply unsustainable and risky and
Re:So It's An Indirect Intangible Gamble? (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet, I much prefer this method to having to watch ads, so long as the thread's priority isn't so high that it interferes with the running of the machine.
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What if this came along with an airtight guarantee? Like: no tracking, snooping, all Facebook/Twitter/G+ buttons turned OFF until you click to activate them, never selling your info, forever, amen. Just mine us Bitcoins... and only while you're on the site.
I'll be honest, I would take that deal over the implicit "pay via getting spied on" internet we have today.
Re:So It's An Indirect Intangible Gamble? (Score:5, Interesting)
What if this came along with an airtight guarantee? Like: no tracking, snooping, all Facebook/Twitter/G+ buttons turned OFF until you click to activate them, never selling your info, forever, amen. Just mine us Bitcoins... and only while you're on the site.
I'll be honest, I would take that deal over the implicit "pay via getting spied on" internet we have today.
+5.
As the family IT guy, most of what I do is fix the damage done by free games. My cousins teenage kids seem to ruin their laptops by installing hundreds of adware programs on their computers which eventually destroy it. Perhaps this would end this trend of destruction.
However this would create another problem in turn. How would bitware apps fight for your idle processor? If left to their own devices they would get greedy and attach higher and higher priorities to their threads in order to muscle out the competitors app. I guess that you would need like a steam deployment platform running that shared your bitcoins based on the amount of time you spent playing each game?
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As the family IT guy, most of what I do is fix the damage done by free games. My cousins teenage kids seem to ruin their laptops by installing hundreds of adware programs on their computers which eventually destroy it. Perhaps this would end this trend of destruction.
I am *so* stealing that warning. It's a far more concise explanation than I have been trying to convey to friends and relatives for nigh-on 25 years without success. I tell them over and over, TANSTAAFL, and they say "But it's free! It says so!" And don't even get me started about my son, now 21, who still hasn't made the connection between all the pirated games he downloads (or is that "gamez he downloadz"?) and the rampant viruses constantly breaking his system.
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That sounds okay for just one site, but once every site adopts the model, your browser will make your gpu scream all the time.
I'm used to that already. I run firefox.
Why play games? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're going to drop cash, why do it indirectly through your electric bill? Just drop the app a buck or two!
Re:Why play games? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why play games? (Score:4, Interesting)
Because if you're using it professionally in the office, it isn't your bill.
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or better yet, similar to the story a couple days ago about the app that "accidentally" shipped with a bitcoin miner...
As the IT God, script out a C&C structure to distribute the miner to all workstations across the company. between 5p and 8a you bring them to life and mine the hell out of the hundreds of PCs at your disposal... and run for cover when your bean counters start wondering why the power usage (and bills) at all of your facilities across the country suddenly shot through the roof. LOL
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Because I hate having to go downstairs to get my wallet every time something needs my credit card number. And I hate giving out my credit card number every time I want to buy something new.
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The vast majority of sites take payment through 3rd parties these days. Paypal is the 500lb gorilla but Google and Amazon both have payment services that are widely accepted. With any of them you payment information is and a username/password away and not exposed to the place you are buying from.
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You don't have the numbers memorized? Wow. You must not make many puchases on-line.
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I try very hard to memorize my numbers, but since my running average in between credit card theft activity appears to be about 1 year, that's a lot of effort for nothing.
Seriously; I do not give out my credit card number to sketchy sites and try to avoid scams, yet it gets stolen anyway. For example, I am a Linode customer and they announced that they were hacked the day after I gave them my new credit card that had been updated as a result of a motel booking scam in which my credit card was stolen. Repla
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Re: So It's An Indirect Intangible Gamble? (Score:2)
Re:So It's An Indirect Intangible Gamble? (Score:4, Interesting)
So basically you're proposing a move from just give me a little cash upfront to let me leech off your electricity bill in a ridiculously circuitous way to gamble for BTC (keeping in mind that the more people that adopt your model of "BitCoin-Ware" the more people will be vying for BTC the less your expected value will return)?
An interesting idea and definitely one for the mathematicians but simply unsustainable and risky and ... I guess deceptive if you don't point out the small cost to their electrical bill ...
Right it's zero sum. pay for it up front or pay for it on the electric bill. It only makes sense when either
1) there's a scam to be had (e.g. the landlord or company is paying your utility bill)
2) you can use the heat the electricy is producing for some purpose you needed anyway. That is to say if your computer is sitting next to a space heater then you might as well turn off the space heater and turn on the bit coin engine.
3) you want to donate your cycles to charity and the charity would be better off with the cycles than a cash donation. (e.g the charity is doing some big calaculation but doesn't want to bother with the hassle of buying and maintaining or admining rented servers.)
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Right it's zero sum. pay for it up front or pay for it on the electric bill. It only makes sense when either
You're assuming the value of the bitcoins generated are equal to the cost of electricity... they might be worth more.
There is the problem, that even if the bitcoins double or triple in value the app author gets the benefit from the capital assets you own, instead of you -- with a fixed number of hours a day scheme.
That might turn out to be worth much more than paying for the app up front.
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Or the transaction costs of paying money is higher than the transaction costs of paying CPU time.
If I'm installing something, the transaction cost of letting it run a task on my machine is very close to zero. The transaction cost of having to get my credit card, key in the number, verify that the site I'm keying it into isn't too shady, keying in my address, and the risk of having my credit card hit one more site is significantly higher.
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Wouldn't it be better to pay directly in Bitcoin? Let's say you get a choice using the product for "free" with ads or removing them in different packages (1 Week, 1 Month, Unlimited). It would be a fair model for payment and you could decide yourself if mining would be worth it or buying the bitcoins would be better. Transaction cost is pretty low even for very small amounts of Bitcoin as far as I know.
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7) The user is too uneducated about how computers work to realise that loading the CPU increases power cunsumption and thus their electricity bill...
What a joke (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What a joke (Score:4)
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I've considered making a game where in the background it operated a bitcoin mining operation for myself like a zombie botnet. I'm sure the idea isn't original at all.
If you'd read the article, you'd have noticed that ESEA beat you to that idea.
Electricity costs money. (Score:2)
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Mining isn't free - the cost of mining is actually less than the cost of electricity on normal desktop machines (otherwise everyone would be doing it already).
As most people probably figured out, in this case less is more.
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Sorry, no. (Score:4, Interesting)
I have only so much extra CPU and GP power and I donate all of it to cancer research, so I don't have any left to give to parasites.
Re:Sorry, no. (Score:5, Funny)
Are you sure I can't change your mind [worldcommunitygrid.org]? Malaria kills far more people per year than cancer, and the grid computing project has far fewer participants. It's also a technically simpler problem they're trying to tackle, meaning your compute time will have significantly higher value in the long run.
(Incoming whooshes in five, four, three...)
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But malaria affects people on other continents. Don't you know ethics only applies when you can see other people suffer personally? And it stops mattering entirely if you put on a business suit first.
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I think there's a great deal to be said for helping people in your community first. The results are more available to you, and recourse in the event of (e.g.) embezzlement of charity dollars is also more available.
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But malaria affects people on other continents. Don't you know ethics only applies when you can see other people suffer personally? And it stops mattering entirely if you put on a business suit first.
I think it would be wrong to suggest that there isn't some selfishness involved in giving to charities a lot of the time. I donate to the RNLI and the MRT partly because I know I might need them myself one day; people donate to cancer charities because they (or their immediate family) might need them some day. Yes, someone in the west donating to a malaria charity is a good thing, but it has a lower chance of helping the donator themselves.
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Bad joke! Bad! To bed without supper for you, Sam :-)
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I used to run something like this (might have been the same thing) years ago, but I became concerned over what impact it has on my electricity usage and the longevity of my computer hardware. Can you shed any light on these concerns?
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Get yourself a kill-a-watt. As for longevity of the hardware: monitor the temperatures, and do some research on how the rise you observe from an idle system affects the reliability of various kinds of components, and what your financial impact may be.
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It seems like a good project to run, but I don't want to install a seperate client for it.
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Many very good things can be said about the solution of exterminating all the particular pests can carry it, as done in other regions; understanding the drawbacks, and that they aren't as bad as malaria.
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(Hey there! One of the projects in our lab is apicomplexan genomics, so I get a few earfuls of plasmodia and trypanosomae every lab meeting.)
Even if cancer has a universal underlying mechanism, research tends to be more about examining individual routes of mutagenesis, and the existing cures for leukaemia are very specific to particular infection sites. I think it's safe to assume we will develop subtype-specific defences long before a general treatment is feasible.
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You make good points about the research on cancer. I am by no means a specialist in this area, but this appears to be consistent with what I know. Also, good things to remember for grant applications, no doubt!
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It is, but that wouldn't help you—up-to-date lab pages are a myth. ;)
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Yeah, I caught that in another reply already [slashdot.org]. Although that malaria figure has been shown to be massively under-estimated [telegraph.co.uk] due to a lack of reporting.
However, there's still a way in which malaria is 'bigger' than cancer: there are many different kinds of cancers, not all of which can be fixed using a single mechanism. Each cancer is a separate and distinctive problem as far as medicine is concerned. Malaria, on the other hand, is only caused by a few parasites in one genus, and they cause the same symptoms v
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ASIC will make it pointless (Score:2)
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For the same reason mutual funds and hedge funds exist (spare me the anti-rich-people jokes, please). If I know how to get a good return on invested money, I can either invest my small pool of money and make x% on that, or offer the service of knowing how to get a good return on invested money and get a smaller % of a potentially MUCH larger pool of money. This works out to a lot more dollars per year for me and for you, assuming my skills are genuine. If they're not, then I'm deluding myself (and you) or
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Risk. That's how finance works: It's largely risk management. Going into the mining business is a risk: You might spend tens of thousands of dollars on an ASIC mining setup, only to see the value of bitcoins collapse suddenly (random fluctuations, another exchange DDoS causing a loss of confidence, a major government declaring bitcoin transfers a form of tax evasion). Then you're left with a lot of very expensive yet useless hardware. Alternatively, you could sell the hardware immediately: You may make les
Mining support instead of ad or other (Score:2)
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Exactly. Perhaps even it could be used by F2P model games ("Enable our bitcoin miner tool and we will credit you for in-game purchases periodically!") as an alternative to paying in cash.
You know, if it was an equal exchange (in-game credit equal to cash value of Bitcoins mined), I might actually go for it.
However, considering the track record of various "reward points" programs, I'm going to guess it won't be an even exchange. Never is.
No. (Score:4, Insightful)
No. If you want to make money (in whatever currency) for your programs, then charge money for your programs --- don't be a douchebag who preys on customers' vulnerability to not accurately counting hidden costs of your schemes. You think your customers would benefit from using their computer time to mine Bitcoin? Then provide them with a handy bitcoin-mining app that they can control, and accept bitcoins as payment for your products.
Re:No. (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not sure quite what you're trying to clarify here? If you want to make more money than you currently charge, then charge more than you currently charge. A scheme like the bitcoin mining plan is just an underhanded way to (probably grossly inefficiently) suck money from your customers' inability to calculate the actual costs of the "free" deal. As noted in SharpFang's post below, most customers running on normal hardware will probably be mining bitcoin at a steep loss --- paying much more in energy, both for the computer and air conditioning to remove the excess heat --- than the bitcoins are even worth. Trying to scrape a bit of extra profit with large hidden costs to the customer might be a successful marketing plan, but you're an asshole for doing it. Just be up-front about what you charge; and, if you honestly think your customers would benefit from some better use of their computer's idle time, then give them separate tools to allow them to make that choice for themselves (educated with all the necessary information) --- don't make those choices for them just to pad your bottom line.
How is this going to work ? (Score:3)
So the premise is exciting but mechanics of it is still a bit unclear to me.
Probably not (Score:4, Insightful)
First, how effective will the users' computers be at mining? The ESEA one worked because their users were hardcore gamers, who are more likely to have powerful GPUs which can mine effectively. You're planning an "app", which implies "smartphone app", which is not going to have nearly enough power to get *any* amount of money. Even with just standard desktops, you're unlikely to get anything. A lot of people *with* powerful GPUs are getting out of the game, because ASICs are making them less effective.
Second, lets look at the effects. A computer mining Bitcoins is *loud*. It's running under full load, and the fans are pretty much pegged at 80-100%. And they also spit out a lot of heat. And so on. I wouldn't like my computer running like that.
Third, how are you going to explain that to users? If they're smart enough to understand Bitcoin, they'll already either be mining, or have decided that they don't want to mine. Your app won't change their mind. As for the other 99% of humanity, how are you going to tell them "you can run this app for free, but for 5hr a week we take over your computer to do stuff" without them calling the FBI? I'm exaggerating, of course, but you are going to have trouble convincing regular users to do this.
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I thought the bitcoin maths problem was highly parallel.. it should scale ok to a million cellphones then.
Ads aren't as profitable (Score:3)
That being said, assuming that it's only mining when I'm actively engaged in the application(to not waste excessive amounts of electricity), I'd approve of this as a replacement to ads. The only downside in comparison to ads is using more power(ie, less battery life in mobile).
Also, this is assuming we have smart and pleasant miners that don't peg CPU/GPU to 100% and cause my computer to crawl, but rather target 80% or less resource utilization. And, of course, not mining in the background. Only mining when I'm actively engaging with the application.
It's been tried (Score:2)
Terrible idea. (Score:5, Informative)
Most users would be mining on CPU power, and that means very poor chance to get any results while wasting enormous amounts of electricity.
You should look at the Mining hardware comparison [bitcoin.it]. Summarizing: Best Xeon setups get 66Mhash/s and most common desktop setups go 1-10Mhash/s
Meanwhile, FPGA mining devices reach 1000-10,000Mhash/s and ASIC ones get order of 10,000-60,000 at powers like 600W.
Now to get power comparable to a single ASIC rig you'd need roughly 1000 customers running 24/7 or 33,000 customers running 5h a week.
33,000 CPUs running at full power, zero energy saving, to produce results comparable with a 600W appliance. This is to stay moderately competetive and get *some* ROI.
While the cost is distributed between the customers, the real cost - the amount of energy wasted - is staggering.
Re:Terrible idea. (Score:5, Funny)
You're probably right.
Better to make it a phone app.
Costs lost in the overhead noise! (Score:3)
.
But this is where these kinds of tricks work: when the person authorizing the use of these "utilities" is not the one paying them. This kind of disconnect is how the college kids at U.C. Irvine and U.C. San Diego rack up huge credit card bills because mommy and daddy pay for them so the kids don't have to worry about how much they charge. They even use the cards as an "auto ATM": pick u
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the chance to get some results is actually 100% provided you have enough slave nodes, since the computation is highly parallel..
but it would probably be worth it only for few select developers. if you had a mobile game that was played 3-5 hours a day by five million people, then you would get results by just using the time _while_ the application was running. hell, you could even build in game rewards to make people keep it open. no terribly many that popular games out there though.
I think the key to fundin
idiotic (Score:2)
My i5-2400 = 12 MH/s bitcoin mining speed @ 95W approx
My old overclocked Radeon 5830 graphics card = 220MH/s @ 200W approx
The new Jalapeno ASIC miner = 4,500+ MH/s @ 2W
The anticipated difficulty raising on mining due to the new cards is estimated at at least 27x so that means you could run the app 24/7 and likely make less than $0.01/day on the average computer while using a hell of a lot more than that in electricity (closer to $0.50 typically).
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Sneaking it in? (Score:2)
Define "sneaking it in". If that means not mentioning it at all, then fuck off. In fact, wouldn't that constitute (I forget the exact wording) unauthorized use of a computing resource, which is a felony?
Absolutely not. (Score:2)
This isn't like the days when ramping up a Pentium 3 to full power meant an extra 20 watts. These days, the difference between idle and balls-out on my gaming rig is hundreds of watts. Eventually, the AC will kick in to keep the room comfortable. Even at idle, it's a pig. I don't run that thing unless I'm playing games. Or if it's a cold night and I want the waste heat to warm the room.
Maybe... (Score:2)
But then again, I'm a "freetard", and I don't pay for software generally anyway. (Though I did spend $20 on a game the other week, and got a good deal I think, no DRM, no hassle.)
Here's the thing, if it's made very very clear, that part of the 'price' for having the app was the it would do a little mining on the side, then it's possible. But, it'd better be an exceptional app. Considering I have never bought productivity software (Linux, Star/Open/LibreOffice, GIMP, and many others) I'm probably not about t
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Yeah that's definitely going to work out well for the developer :p
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1) It would be better if they simply accepted donations than attempted to hijack (even if it were with permission) someone's machine with bitcoin mining software.
2) It would be better if they charged for the software (shareware/demoware) than to hijack...
Convenient that you missed out the second point.
3) It would be better if they charged for support, bug fixes or other such labor, than to hijack ...
In other words, almost any usual scheme for getting people to give you money for software is going to be a be
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if I wanted to be generally annoying, I could just limit your program, so that you never get any CPU time (unless I actually want to use it).
What if the program required Administrator / System / root privileges to install, and included a lightweight kernel driver to run the mining code, scheduled as realtime threads guaranteed to use whatever CPU time it was programmed to reserve?
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installed in a virtual machine, or (more likely because I bet it's a Windoze only program) run via Wine (which'll mean that it put all the deep hooks into the system it wants, it still isn't getting what it wants).
(If it were not FLOSS, and wanted root privileges to install on my Ubuntu machine, I just wouldn't install it. It's a matter of trust.)
Hell no (Score:2)
BitCoin is a nice geek idea, and like all nice geek ideas, fails incredibly in actual practice.
Not worth it (Score:2)
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"people don't like paying, even pennies, up front for something but are happy to hand over things worth far more (personal information, viewing time etc) after they have become users."
So what you need is some sort of time-limited mode? Let the user run the software for free for a time, a month or so, then disable some or all functionality until payment is made.
Back in a moment, the nineties are calling.
Fail (Score:2)
Why would I run their app while my computer is idle? Why would I not turn it off, hibernate it or put it in standby?
Why would I want them to burn through 1kWh per week of my power bill? (assuming 200W at 100% CPU/GPU for 5 hours) That's about $15 per year.
Let me think about this ... nope. (Score:3)
What do you think about this?
I'm going to go with "Hell no, with a side of fuck you."
Oh for Christ's sake (Score:2)
Stop it with the Bitcoin articles. We're not interested in your Ponzi scheme.
Rob
Re:Oh for Christ's sake (Score:5, Informative)
Get your schemes right. This is no Ponzi scheme.
At most it's a pump-and-dump.
1. Invest in something (goods, shares, bitcoins)
2. Spread hype or outright lies to cause the price to rise (eg, claim the company you just bought stock in got a massive contract)
3. Sell at the inflated price, and do so quickly before people realise the misinformation.
Oh you mean like the Digsby Research module? (Score:2)
In 2008, there was a bit of a stink raised when chat client Digsby implemented a "Research Module" that used local CPU resources while the machine was not active. Their blog post [digsby.com] announcing the fact was in 2008, and I'm not sure that they ever removed this functionality.
It was reason enough for me to force anyone I knew to uninstall the tool - I'm not keen on subscriptions, especially fluctuating cost ones.
Will it get rid of the BitCoin mining malware... (Score:2)
...that is already on your Windows box?
Necessarily Inefficient Transaction (probably) (Score:4, Insightful)
GPUs are no longer cost efficient for mining bitcoins, in terms of marginal electricity cost(1). Therefore, it cannot be cost efficient for a person to run the bitcoin mining software on their home machine. Given that it cannot be a cost efficient use of the user's electricity, it is not possible for the user to be engaging in an informed, consensual transaction(2)(3). Transactions without informed consent are market distortions, reduce GDP in the long run, and are not ethical.
1. That may not be strictly true, right now, with the sudden rise in bitcoin price and the lag in bringing new specialized hardware online, but any such brief market distortin resulting in cost efficiency will be optimized away quickly.
2. Except for the possibility that the transaction cost of the user directly paying the software provider is enough to make it inefficient to pay directly, but still efficient to pay for more electricity (a transaction that is already happening, so the transaction cost is sunk) and give the discounted proceeds to the software provider.
3. Or if the user also gets satisfaction from the very act of running the bitcoin mining client, because he or she believes it is worth the personal cost for the social good of helping to process bitcoin transactions.
Bitcoin User Agreement? (Score:2)
What if I "accept" this extra little dose of malware that will mine bitcoins for the company whose service I use and then use some other software or technique to block my computer from mining bitcoins? Will I have to promise to keep my machine running during off-hours? Will I have to deliver a certain level of bitcoin mining service?
Will this become the new model for consumer purchases? When you buy some good or service, will you now work for the company who sold it to you?
I've tried to think of some way
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Will this become the new model for consumer purchases? When you buy some good or service, will you now work for the company who sold it to you?
Like how the company store used to take only company scrip, and employees used to get payed in company scrip, redeemable only at the company store?
what's old is new again [wikipedia.org]?:
Bitcoin (Score:2, Interesting)
I am not sure I like the idea of money "just appearing" in ones pocket because you happen to have more computing power than anyone else to mine bit coins.
Pray tell, just who currently does that happen to be?
NSA
CIA
Pentagon
Wall Street
Federal Reserve
All of the above have the most computing power for bitcoin mining.
No thanks to Bitcoin.
The entire idea of a currency is that it is suppose to be the holder of intrinsic value, and cannot be meddled with by any single entity to gain an advantage in trade.
Historicall
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Money "just appears" when a government mints it. You don't seem to have a problem with that.
It is an interesting model (Score:2)
I get access to, say, a paywalled site, for allowing their client X hours of CPU time a month. Or perhaps X GFLOPS per month.
Do it yourself (Score:2)
1. Install bitcoin mining software on your PC.
2. Run it whenever you aren't using the computer.
3. Profit!!
4. Use the profit to buy whatever game you want.
CO2 to Bitcoin conversion rate (Score:2)
Has anyone actually sat down and worked out the CO2 conversion rate (I realise theres a tonne of different variables here such as nuke or renwables, gas fired vs coal fired stations) in terms of the power used to create these "coins"?
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you assume that network access is not implicitely needed for other app to function.
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Perhaps you don't... but perhaps if you could exchange your CPU time for (example) free shiping on Newegg then I bet your interest would increase.
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Let me echo and amend that:
Hell no.
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+1
Folding@Home and SETI@Home have been popular with people wanting to advance science, I'm sure that mining for charities (i.e.: BitCoin@Home) would take off with the OxFam-style crowds. I'm dead against companies building mining into software that's supposed to be doing something else - that takes the decision away from users and is nothing better than a botnet for scammers/spammers.
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