Re: Advertisers won't be happy.
It is with some guilt, and more than a little regret, that advertising on El Reg is blocked here.
The annoyance factor of most ads is but a minor part of it.
The eating up of my data limit by adverts for stuff I'm not even remotely interested in is a minor part of it (although the data size of the advert is often more than the article, compared to my other usage it's relatively small).
Hijacking my speakers, interrupting what I was listening to and requiring a frantic scrabble for the mute, is a larger part of it.
Making my system cripplingly slow is a big part of it.
Crashing my browser is the main reason. Every so often, guilt persuades me to unblock El Reg. Within a week (often the same day), some fucking advert crashes my browser. I often have quite a lot of browser windows/tabs open at the time (what I was working on prior to deciding I needed a break), and this is really fucking annoying. Yes, usually I can restore session, but that takes a while and sometimes results in the same ad crashing the browser again.
Bitcoin mining would stop the minor annoyances (data use, speaker hijacking, annoyance of advertising). As long as it played nice (very nice, as in unix nice) with my system, I'm fine with that (it can have 100% CPU while I'm not doing anything, but as soon as I do anything it has to give me priority). As long as it doesn't need so much memory that my system goes into a paroxysm of thrashing pages in and out, I'm fine with that. I suffer a minor increase in my power bill and El Reg gets some money - seems great.
Ideally it would be implemented as a user-configurable choice: accept advertising or mine for bitcoin or pay a subscription (I'm thinking of wider implementation than just El Reg here).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
