A few months ago we read in various digital media, that The Pirate Bay was mining cryptocurrency using the browser of users who visited the website.
In this article we will explain the technique used to mine monero in the browser.
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Today, no one doubts the popularity of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.
Bitcoin has become a lucrative business.
Nobody at this point doubts that advertising on the web is a part of the monetization of many websites.
But ads are usually annoying and uninteresting for the user who visits the web.
They affect the usability and remove a space where there could be a content of value for the user.
Coinhive allows you to mine monero using the browser by incorporating some Javascript libraries in the web pages of a website.
These Javascript libraries use threads to execute some algorithms and websockets processes to connect with the various Coinhive servers to send and receive hashes to mine and other related information.
It is even a good idea to ask for donations from anonymous users, without having to make payments with a visa or paypal.
Even a small amount of 0.001 euros could be made, since the cryptocurrencies are divided into such small parts that their value corresponds to a thousand eurocents (depending on the monero value currently).
Monero is a cryptocurrency suitable to be mined in browsers. It uses the Cryptonight algorithm, which is quite adequate to be mined using the CPUs of the most common computers of the users.
The same does not happen when mining other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, which do take advantage of the power of a graphics card (GPU) for mining. In Bitcoin there is a huge difference between mining with CPUs or with GPUs.
Now, to put some economic figures, for a blog that receives about 10 visits a day, the profit obtained by mining monero in the browser (using 20% of CPU) will be so small (about 0.00001 XMR that are 0, 00074 euros) that it would be more convenient to search for other monetization strategies.
It is clear that websites with few visits are not going to get rich using this technology.
The Coinhive libraries allow you to adjust the percentage of CPU that will be used from the user's machine.
The problem is not always the technology, coinhive is an excellent idea to monetize websites instead of using Ads, but as always the man perverts it, for its malicious use.
There are websites, which use the tokens and captchas of coinhive that mine monero, in an ethical and transparent way.
In fact there are several versions of the coinhive miner, and one of them is not marked as a virus or malware, since it requires an express acceptance of the user so that it starts to mine monero.
That is, a warning is displayed (as a popup) that asks the user if he/she wants to use his computer to mine monero.
In short, there is a campaign in the media to put an end to coinhive, when the real problem is several groups of people who carry out activities that are not too licit.
So, ...will you share your CPU?
