First-order effects

• Ad-blocking visitors to Salon now face a direct trade-off: allow the site to mine Monero on their computer or drop the block, giving Salon a revenue path that bypasses both display ads and the blockers themselves.
• Adblock Plus's existing anti-mining filter puts the two products on a collision course — the same tool that blocks covert cryptojacking can also block Salon's opt-in miner, forcing a policy line between consented and covert mining.

Second-order effects

• Other publishers watching the test gain a template for monetizing blocked inventory without paywalls, while anti-ad-blocking vendors like PageFair — burned before by the hack that pushed malware to over 500 sites — face pressure to distinguish legitimate consent flows from abuse.
• The experiment ties Salon's revenue to Monero's price and protocol, which the relationships show swung from $0.50 to $12 over a year and underwent a hard fork against ASIC mining — volatility publishers neither control nor hedge.

Third-order effects

• The model's fragility showed quickly: Coinhive, the best-known in-browser Monero miner, announced it would shut down citing the crypto crash and the Monero hard fork (Coinhive's shutdown), suggesting consent-based browser mining may not survive as a standalone publisher business.
• If the pattern holds anyway, publisher monetization splits into two tracks — attention sold to advertisers versus reader-donated compute or payments — with browsers and blockers acting as gatekeepers deciding which track loads by default.