CoinHive, a Monero (XMR) Crypto Miner for Your Website

Recently we have introduced to you JSEcoin – JavaScript Embeded Cryptocurrency for Webmasters as an interesting new project that uses JavaScript mining via the browser of users and that can be used to monetize website traffic. But another similar service has gotten much more attention lately as it was found to be used on The Pirate Bay (a torrent website) in the form of an embedded JS miner for Monero (XMR). The service in question is Coin Hive and it allows you users to embed JavaScript miners in their website as a side source of revenue, so the service in itself is not bad or evil or whatever. The problem with The Pirate Bay is that they have introduced the JavaScript code of the miner without letting any of the visitors know, so people started noticing that when they open the website their CPU load skyrockets and that is not fine.

The main problem we are seeing here with a service like that is when users don’t know that you are using their computing resources to mine, you need to tell them or offer them the choice to do it in order to support the website. The default example from Coin Hive does not come with any visual user interface or anything to let the users know there is a miner, but what if you give your visitors a link to click that will open up a page with a miner. They would be able to open up and control the miner as well as monitor it and have that page open and the miner running in order to support the website or the community they are a part of with their computing power. It is an interesting idea and a one that might actually work out well for some people, the problem however is that most of the users would be thinking along the way of abusing a service like that and making profit at the expense of some users. Still, if you find the project interesting and useful you might look into it, just make sure you tell your visitors what you are doing if you embed it on a website in order not to have negative, instead of positive results!

Apart from the embeddable web-based miner using JavaScript the CoinHive service offers some other interesting alternatives to more traditional services such as a Proof of Work Shortlinks service as well as Proof of Work Captcha. Both of these user actual mining of a certain number of hashes before allowing you to forward you to a certain link or to confirm that you are a human and not a bot. Using Proof of Work (mining) for more common things that normally utilize different approaches can actually be a interesting way to improve and yet at the same time monetize some aspects from an already working service. In short you might want to think outside of the box and think of new ways to use crypto mining in a way that you may even reward users for doing the “heavy lifting” in an existing web-based game or a social network for example. Of course computing hashes in a browser with JavaScript is not the most efficient way to do things, especially compared to optimized mining software. We have played around with the miner and the extra PoW-based services available, though do note that we have not embedded this miner into the website here and we would not do it without warning you should we decide to test it live for example.

– For more details and to check out the CoinHive JavaScript web-based Monero (XMR) miner…