> If you pay for your own electricity, you'd be better off donating directly.
But to donate directly, you'd need a common payment service. That means registering (password and two-factor), then either transferring money to your account or authorizing it to draw from your bank account, and finally sending the payment, probably revealing a fair few bit of information about yourself to a website you may like but not necessarily trust. And every step of that process can be hacked, or have connection problems, or you may be on a different computer and need to re-login, and so on.
Paying with electricity lets you skip all that, and HN should be well aware that convenience is worth a lot of money.
In addition to that, with money you must choose how much to donate, and that is a burden on its own. (Does this blogger deserve one buck, or two? I gave two to that article last week, and this dude is almost as good, but I've decided my weekly budget is X €, and I'm almost over it, etc. etc.)
With a JS miner, you pay exactly as long as you keep the tab open, which is a pretty good proxy for how much the page is personally valuable to you.
Not good enough, not by a long shot. Even with that feature and all browser windows are completely minimized they still take a significant amount of CPU without any mining going on.
I have an average of 30 tabs open at all times and to be honest I don't see it. Aside from the RAM usage background tabs are dormant. Where did you get this info?
For "paying with electricity" to be a reasonable description, it had better be the case that most of the cost of the electricity ends up with the site owner. That's not going to work with mining schemes where aging personal computers are the worst at it.
I literally have tabs open for months at a time. If any more than 0 of them tries to mine without me explicitly opting in I'd be furious.
There are services such as flattr and patreon that tries to fix this. It is not perfect and the horrendous javascript-infested pages today and click-bait focus doesn't exactly encourage donation.
But to donate directly, you'd need a common payment service. That means registering (password and two-factor), then either transferring money to your account or authorizing it to draw from your bank account, and finally sending the payment, probably revealing a fair few bit of information about yourself to a website you may like but not necessarily trust. And every step of that process can be hacked, or have connection problems, or you may be on a different computer and need to re-login, and so on.
Paying with electricity lets you skip all that, and HN should be well aware that convenience is worth a lot of money.
In addition to that, with money you must choose how much to donate, and that is a burden on its own. (Does this blogger deserve one buck, or two? I gave two to that article last week, and this dude is almost as good, but I've decided my weekly budget is X €, and I'm almost over it, etc. etc.)
With a JS miner, you pay exactly as long as you keep the tab open, which is a pretty good proxy for how much the page is personally valuable to you.