I've never really taken this crypto-currency thing serious but this particular article grabbed my attention and I found CoinHive's website and within a few minutes I set up a crypto-currency minor on one of my ground snow load maps to test the concept: http://design.medeek.com/resou... (note that you have to click on the map at least five times before the daily allowance of lookups is exceeded and then the notice for the crypto miner is displayed). After mucking around with it a bit and letting it run for a couple of hours as well as checking my CoinHive balance (XMR) a few things jumped out at me: 1.) This sort of thing is very simple to implement, a minor amount of javascript, so we may see a surge in this type of micro-payments. 2.) The surge in CPU usage is annoying however the website can ramp the actual usage down to a lower level so that it is less of an annoyance, I set my coinhive miner to throttle back 60% so as not to grab too many CPU cycles. 3.) The only way this is actually going to work is if the website visitor is literally spending hours on a particular website/page. 4.) Harvesting or mining crypto-currency is a very inefficient way of generating income, the whole of idea of running all of these hash calculations seems like a vast waste of time and energy. In the real world the production of good and services (useful) is what generates income. Crypto-currency just doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me in that regard, maybe someone can explain it rationally to me. 5.) Ads or CPU utilization, pick your poison. I still prefer a micro-payment via paypal or credit card, but people hate paying for things directly. My conclusion is that there are probably better methods to obtain micro-payments, I am fully expecting this sort of thing to evolve further in the next few months and ultimately internet ads may go the way of the dinosaurs.

I think this post really hits the nail on the head. From my own personal experience my basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, PERL, and JAVASCRIPT has allowed me to create an online presence even though my main line of work and experience is engineering. I currently have a website that showcases my residential design work (http://design.medeek.com). It took me about 2 months to cobble this together. Granted I could have sub-contracted it out and not worried about it but then it would have been a black box to me. Now when I need to make any changes I know where exactly everything lives and how it all fits together. If you are any sort of entrepreneur worth his or her salt in today's world I would say that it is almost mandatory to have some sort of web programming skills.