If a user visits a website that mines cryptocurrency in the background at a low intensity, what harm do they experience? Unless the mining is intense enough to spin up their fan, it’s possible they may not even notice. To be clear, I still think the concept has some theoretical merit. Ultimately, I took the miner down after a year because it hadn’t even earned enough in that time to reach the payout threshold – not by an order of magnitude! Had I made more money with it, I might have left it in place… at least until Coinhive shut down a few months later. I felt a little awkward about having something commonly thought of as malware running on every page of my site, but for a while that was outweighed by my support for the idea of cryptomining as an advertising alternative. While I was still running the miner, this blog ended up on a couple of “hacked sites” lists, because the very presence of Coinhive code was considered an indicator of compromise. In a remarkably short time, the in-browser cryptominer went from a novel means for funding web publishing to irredeemable malware. When Coinhive released AuthedMine, I dutifully switched to it. Why they didn’t do this in the first place is something we can speculate about.īeing a naive optimist and a believer in the legitimate potential for such a technology, I adopted it quite early, providing a transparent, user-controlled mining interface from the start. In response to this, they released a new verson of their cryptominer called AuthedMine, which explicitly required user consent before it would start mining.
The miner code was provided by the now-defunct Coinhive, which managed to attract an enormous amount of negative coverage after it was used to mine cryptocurrency without user consent on a number of hacked sites – this practice was termed cryptojacking. Brave Rewards and web monetisation 12 September 2020īetween October 2017 and November 2018, I experimented with monetising this website using an opt-in JavaScript cryptominer.
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