The surplus


The crisis

In recent years a lot of websites have been in some sort of crisis. As the main way of generating profit has been the selling data of users and visitors. And thanks to the moral and security problems this has caused many users, visitors, and even website makers to see this business practices as negative, and users trying to avoid this practices completely ,using programs such as Brave Browser or Privacy Badger, to prevent data recollection. We can even clearly see how when Apple implemented a feature to prevent websites from tracking information the stocks of several social media companies went down.

But wait ads and donations will be perfect replacements

Even thought I think ads and donations can be a good way of producing money , as long as they don’t violate privacy and aren’t a glorified paywall respectively, I must admit this methods have a lot of problems. On the one hand most ad companies are sketchy or are owned by monopolies with strict requirements ,such as Google Ads, and in most cases they have the same tracking devices that are trying to be replaced. Not to mention the public's general distaste for online advertisement and the subconscious manipulation that ads bring thanks to their nature. On the other hand donations aren’t the solution in my opinion. As most ways of accepting donations are having an account on a website like Patron or PayPal , which not only will take part of the profit ,but also may censor or ban you for your ideals , the type of content presented, or other reasons. An example of this was the case between Wikileaks and PayPal. Furthermore donations encourage creators to block their websites and content behind a paywall, making people who don’t have the amount of money to pay regularly to a creator have a worst experience.

Let the test begin!

Recently I have discovered a possible,(but not so new), way of making profit on the internet without affecting the users nor the visitors, website mining. For those who doesn't know website mining is the act of mining crypto for the website’s owner instead of seeing ads or giving information. I think this could be great, as the users only need to give a little more of their energy, which they already are willing to spend by using an electronic device .Not mention the amount expended isn’t the same expended with regular miner. Also there wouldn’t need to be a security risk of loosing the users information and you wouldn’t need to spend money in servers to store recollected data.

Nothing is perfect

Sadly this technology seems to have one mayor problem. It requires you to have an external company in order to mine, taking part of the total profit ,making the system less anonymous, and having the possibility of them censoring. However I think that eventually someone will probably make an individual web miner as this technology improves and became more widespread. For now I’m still interested in this technology and think that at least we should give it a try before we can rule that option out. However I sadly haven’t been able to learn how the pure code of this works and what is the most optimise way to do it, so please if you know or have some sources which talk about the topic in depth please contact me.

Video used to set up the simple web miner