Crypto Thoughts ... CT- #4 - Cryptojacking : A new way of mining cryptocoins
Cryptojacking is a new way of mining cryptocoins.
Introduction
In the current scenario, the mining is tough because one has to compete with several other nodes having same or higher computing power. In fact, some individual miners jointly formed mining pools.
FACT: To mine Bitcoins, people invest billions of dollars.
Still, with the increasing number of new cryptocoins, it is possible to cryptocoins, where mining is done through Proof of work (PoW) i.e. based on hardware - CPUs, GPUs.
Understand the concept
These days, the developers are using their coding skills to feed scripts, which runs in the background of the website. So, when a user visits the site, their computer is used for mining cryptocoins.
It is happening particularly while doing torrent downloads.
The torrent download happens somewhat in a decentralised manner i.e. using BitTorrent protocol.
Therefore, the BitTorrent is a peer to peer network.
These developers, hackers indulge in illegal activity. In fact, without even informing the users, they use the CPU power of several users who are downloading/uploading the files from/into the network. One can imagine that there are so many users visiting the sites and if the computing power of individual systems is added, the Miner can easily have a very high computing power. The PCs, laptops get hot, in fact, one can see that in their task manager.
In Windows OS, here it can be seen that a particular tab in Chrome is using the max. amount of CPU power.
Few days back, the pirate bay torrent website used this kind of mining. And after the matter got headlined in the media, they mentioned that they were testing. Also, they added that they are about to take off the Ads and instead will be using the computing power of millions of nodes, downloading/uploading the files using the BitTorrent protocol.
Solution
In order to not allowing these websites to use your computing power, you can use the extensions available in the browsers.
Following are some of them:
Users can visit these websites using the dedicated browser called 'Tor'