I recently came across this pretty amazing piece of code on Thepiratebay.com you basically help keep the site running by paying with a few CPU cycles that are used to mine Monero and as a cool bonus there is already a working, user friendly, tool that does this :D. The implications of this technology might be pretty huge.

Why it helps the web

Currently the only way we are able to pay for a websites service is by being the product. Google, FB and most every other site you visits probably makes their living by selling Ad’s. We are in this dilema because micropayment are virtually impossible, due to the mining cost of processing, be it if you are using your credit card, PayPal or bitcoin.

Even when we figure how to do micropayment via Lightning Network. What im calling a Hash Payment will have a large role in the ecosystem. Because it will be cheaper for many users who already own a computer with a cpu to pay with some CPU cycles. Because the marginal cost to so for a user is 0 compared to buying bitcoin to send via LN.

This is currently being used in the pirate bay instead of AD’s and Coin Hive even has a re-captcha to verify you are human by paying with POW. But I can see this payment spreading to hundreds of different API’s from pings to video streaming.

Why it helps CPU friendly currencies

Distribution is a key component to bootstrapping a currency, if more people use it will probably be more valuable since the network will be larger. Bitcoin did it by doing CPU mining on crypto OG’s computers that where attracted to the idea of internet money. People that have website can just do the math and even if they hate Monero they can get paid and sell them. Some will keep a % of Monero.

Why it might save POW

We currently have much of the mining power centralized in such few hands you could literally fit them in a NYC Marriott conference room. Monero uses an mining algo called Cryptonight that utilizes a bunch of memory so creating an ASIC is pretty hard and even if you managed to pulled it off you might get 2x improvement vs the 1000x of sha256, you might even get an advantage by running it in a centralized fashion. But the economics might still not work out for centralized miners, since the marginal cost to use the CPU in my mac book pro is 0 so i will happily mine at loss.

TLDR: Pay with CPU cycles for content/APIs instead of your information whilst site managers get more revenue than Ad’s and kill miner centralization at the same time.

If you enjoy the rambling you might like following me on twitter, @mcrsqr