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Neat! Distributed computing with JS is an awesome tech trick, some friends and I did something similar back during Node Knockout (MapRejuice: https://github.com/ryanmcgrath/maprejuice).

Curious to see what you guys think of the ethical side of it though - do you let this run on mobile, etc? This will almost definitely cause extra battery drain on mobile devices, you think it's fine to have this happen without user consent? ;)




BitCoin mining could replace banner ads. I have Flash on my mobile, which often uses lots of CPU usage for ads. You could argue this is the same.


Yeah, you could argue this... and then we could just point out that Jobs & co are right, and Flash has been a battery hog since the dawn of time. This is a reason why the iPhone can be so performant; you're arguing that it's perfectly acceptable to degrade the otherwise shockingly good performance of a mobile device when it can be avoided entirely.

Flash needs to stay out of this argument, as at the end of the day it's still a real ethical question - how much CPU are you realistically allowed to take and continually use from a user visiting your page?


I was going to say the same thing. Seems like an annoying flash ad uses a ton of CPU as well.




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