Over the past year, there's been this huge hype in my country about tap-to-mine games. As the name implies, these are simple web games that claim to reward you with cryptocurrencies. I think it's okay, but I also feel the need to criticize them strongly. From what I understand, real mining is proposed by various blockchains as a consensus method to confirm that miners are genuine users of the network. So, can just a web page accomplish that? I highly doubt it.
Then there's cloud mining, which seems popular these days. You keep a web page open, and it ‘mines’ a token for you. But how can that ensure your computer or phone is legit? Personally, I believe that if something like Midjourney (when it was just starting) rewarded users with crypto tokens, that concept would be way more acceptable. You're providing data (like prompts and input images) and then getting rewarded. I’d probably call it "Generate to earn" or "proof of generation".
I’m not against the idea of a fun game that offers decent crypto rewards (there are loads of them around now), but a game like Hamster Kombat drove people I know a bit crazy. A friend of mine poured a ton of time into it and ended up with about $60, which is practically nothing. If she had worked as a waitress or babysat her niece instead, I'm sure she would have made way more in that time. I really like the concept of sharing resources for rewards (like what bittensor does, if I'm not mistaken).
First they start by deceiving the people by calling that tap-to-earn game mining, and then later on they go with the logic of also considering it to be an airdrop at the same time, which is basically quite the opposite.
All the Telegram play-to-earn games don't fall under mining, nor are they airdrops; they are built-in TON-based games, and they use that medium to earn from the traffic of participants and end up rewarding their victims with penny coins/tokens whose total worth is not even up to the internet charges they spend all the while that they were tapping their screen.
Tap to mine isn't really mining, it's just a gimmick. There's no way you mine anything by tapping at all .
As for cloud mining through opening a web app it could actually happen, there's something called cryptojacking where a malicious website injecting js code to mine crypto, it took your GPU/CPU resources to solve math so I guess it's real mining but we need to distinguish fake mining through web app to real ones. As far as I know there's just too many scams with these web mining thing it's not worth trying at all.
Honestly, I only consider bitcoin mining or any hardware based mining as the real mining, just my opinion though.
This is exactly my point. You know, a lot of people come and play. They can tell their investors that "we've got 200 million users per day" since Telegram is a massive social app with a lot of users who're coming from bankrupt economies, and having bold claims such as "This air drop will be the next bitcoin" can easily trick people to get to it.
I agree. Hardware based mining is the real thing. Those browser miners usually only benefit the owner of the page and not you.