I ran across this article today, and had to write about it. It’s such simple, yet elegant way to utilize crypto and blockchain technology to deliver value to both customers while still making enough money to keep the lights on back home!
Salon, a big digital media company, has decided to afford their clients the opportunity to lend their CPU processing power to mine Monero coin instead of viewing paid advertising while visiting on the site. To accomplish this, Salon has employed a simple JavaScript plugin, Coinhive, which runs in the background while users view content and navigate around.
Since the invention of websites and digital advertising, the revenue model for media outlets on the internet has essentially been the same: attract a large enough audience and collect ad money from paying clients. The proliferation of blockchain technology has completely turned this model upside down, and offered a completely new way of doing things.
In the process of reading about this shift, I became really excited for two reasons:
The first is that it is another example of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies expanding more fully into their ultimate potential. It’s a simple application of basic crypto principles, but no less exciting in terms of the consequences it has for the traditional ad revenue model of digital content.
And the second is related directly to the simplicity of this project. While a lot of people in the world are busy scratching their heads trying to solve really complicated problems relating to cryptography on the blockchain, network scalability, asset stability, etc, Coinhive and Salon have reminded us that it doesn’t all have to be so complicated. Of course, those issues are hugely important to the future of blockchain, but there are a lot of really simple and intuitive applications of crypto sitting right in front of our nose — applications that could prove to be enormously valuable for millions of people.
Blockchain technology, and its application in the crypto industry have the potential to be hugely t
ransformative in the modern world. But in our pursuit of sophisticated technology, let’s not forget about the low hanging, simple opportunities that are no less useful than the hard stuff in our daily lives!
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