Recently, some unethical website operators have made it into the news for running cryptomining as a form of malware embedded in web app components that run without the users being aware of their machines being co-opted. Some approaches are even more unscrupulous.
Turning deviousness into wholesome and diverting past-times is what the EVE community does best.
It occurs to me that MMO networks represent a considerable opportunity for mutual benefit if conducted above board with permission from all involved. Components like the client or a launcher are often left active and idling for long periods of time.
If a user were to select the option to run the crypto mining as a background operation, the developer could well harvest the hashcash generated by the entire participating network. As a reward, the user could receive an ingame token of value, really any sort of incentive to stay attached to the network and active. PLEX tokens are an obvious destination, but other parallels such as what are generated by research projects are also viable.
Rewards might as well be based on some processing metric and of course time spent running the app. That may be unfair, but then also consider that some players might just open a great many clients that are barely processing any data.
I imagine a lot of community site operators might find this worthy of consideration as well.
Critique?