Coinhive is a company offering JavaScript-based online mining. The special thing about them is that you can embed the code in your website. This will make your page visitors mine Monero(XMR) for you.
Of course you have to inform them about this point but that's not what we're going to talk about today.
How do I earn with it?
As I said earlier, your page visitors mine for you. But there are a handfull of other ways to use this.
You can shorten links using CoinHive, too. To get to the target website your visitors first needs to do a specified amount of hashes. This will get you some Monero, too.
You can vary the amount of hashes you want your visitor to make before he is redirected, this'll change the amount you earn/visitor but the amount of time it takes for your visitor to do the proof of work too.
Last and least you can mine it yourself. You can mine Monero on the CoinHive website yourself, but it's not really profitable.
The question of all questions - is it worth it?
We can simply calculate this.
We gain 0.00005671 XMR per 1 million hashes which is about 0.1 $USD at this point of time.
I reach about 50h/s with an Intel Core I7 7700K. If I want to mine 1$USD, I need 100,000,000 hashes, which takes 100,000,000/50=2,000,000 seconds which is ~33,333 minutes/555 hours/23days,
I don't know a power company which sells enough power to run an Intel Core I7 7700K for 23 days for under 1$USD, if you do, call me please!
Secondly, let's calculate the profitability of embedding a mining script in your website.
We'll calculate how long it takes to gain 1 $USD with different values for visitor count&mining time/visitor.
If you have 1000 visitors, every single one of them has to solve 100,000 hashes. If they all mine 16.6 minutes a day with a ~hashrate of 50h/s, you need 2 days to get your 1$USD.
If you only got 100 visitors instead, you need 20 days obviously.
Your visitors probably won't stay so long on your website though.
If they only stay for ~2minutes and got ~25h/s in average (which isn't uncommon) your first dollar with 1000 visitors is mined after 40 days.
But if you've got 10,000 visitors who mine 16.6 minutes with 50h/s you gain 5$USD per day, at
100,000 visitors it's already 50$USD per day which is quite good.
Conclusion
Although other methods to convert visitors into money such as ads are way more profitable ,
using CoinHive can be profitable - if you have a great audience / lots of page visitors.
