Reading two articles recently, one about how the web has become all about selling you as a product and mining data to sell you ads and one about the New Jersey goons confiscating all the code of an MIT student who did a proof of concept (although this was done in the early days of mining) to mine bitcoins in a web browser.

Wouldn't it be great if government just got the f**k out of the way and let website providers use their viewers browsers to mine for coins? Yes, ask their permission first but nobody is going to mind clicking OK to let the website earn a bit of more if it means less tracking of our every move, so long as they aren't getting their battery drained.

It overcomes the micro-payment barrier effortlessly, what's a few more pence on the electric bill, makes more efficient use of power and means those who produce content that keeps eyeballs for longest earn more instead of the short attention span crap that floods the web now. All it requires is for the anti-money laundering crap to get out of the way and allow an actual economy to grow on the web instead of artists and writers gradually earning less and less while Google and Facebook slowly take over the world.

Would it work with Bitcoin if enough viewers joined in? If you got a few thousands willing hits a day would you earn anything close to decent? You could always get your script to switch to a more profitable alt coin. The security would be tricky too but as an idea I think the MIT guy was spot on.