With pools of GPU- and FPGA- and ASIC-miners in play in a blockchain, raising the block difficulty, any individual user just doing CPU mining has a negligible chance of ever generating any money for themselves; and will only make negligible amounts by being a member of a mining pool.
These mining scripts are worth money to their owners only because they get to make all the dividends from the covert mining pool they've created.
There is a reason that "immediately join a Bitcoin mining pool" isn't commonly-heard advice; that it's not something everyone does for their aunt. The average computer just isn't going to make enough money to be worth it—even just to pay for microtransactions.
Not at all. First, electricity is much more expensive than the price they put in their estimate. Second, a computer running at 100% CPU uses much more electricity than what they accounted for.
Let us not tunnelvision with US/USD PoV only. There are other countries and currencies in the world; both places where electricity is cheaper and more expensive.
That's definitely more economically efficient, but then people just pirate the content.
The caveat is taxation, though. If I earn the money and buy with it, I have to pay with after-tax dollars, but if I mine in browser, the money/cryptocurrency units never passed through me. Depending on personal income tax rates, that's as much as a 50% cost difference (for the income that would be earned by mining, though, not labor I have a comparative advantage in, of course).
Doesn’t seem to work in the real world. Most orgs over-value their content and don’t seem to realize that more effort put in does not translate to higher value (or real/perceived utility to the reader).
Hence the passive revenue generation of advertising. Once people have to put a number of resource they’re willing to pay next to the article they clicked on out of curiosity, they decide it’s not worth bothering.
or most users undervalue their content? who's to say who is in the right?
The fact is, users are currently used to free content. What can be done, business model-wise, to keep it that way, but remove ads from the equation? I don't see a way unfortunately.
