Posts Tagged ‘coinhive’

Grid Cash, Another Website Mining Service for Webmasters

3, Mar 2018

CoinHive may stull be the most popular and misused service for website owners willing to monetize their website traffic with visitors mining crypto, but it is not the only one. In fact there are others that are trying to implement the website mining in a less obtrusive way, giving webmasters more control and warning visitors and letting them stop mining. One such service that we have recently checked out is Grid Cash that uses a web-based Monero (XMR) miner.

The service allows webmasters to fully customize the way the miner works, including control over the CPU load (resources used), so by lowering the usage you can easily make the miner less of a burden for the users. There are options to load the mining code locally, so it will not be easily blocked like when it is being loaded from a single remote host and of course the option to enable notification for users with an opt out feature. There is a detailed statistics available that helps you keep track of your earnings, though they depend a lot on how many visitors you get and for how long they stay on your website. We advise you not to try to abuse services like this one that uses your website visitor’s resources to mine for you as you’d most likely want to keep the visitors and increase them instead of driving them away, so proceed with caution when using services like these.

– For more information and to check out the Grid Cash website mining service…

No Coin Browser Extension For Blocking Coin Miners Such as CoinHive

4, Oct 2017

We have already discussed How To Easily and Effectively Block The Coin Hive Web Miner from all websites as it is being used and abused too much lately, but the simple method we talked about using an Ad Blocker is not the only one. There is already a dedicated browser extension called No Coin that is available for Chrome, Firefox and Opera with the sole purpose to get you rid of the CoinHive mining code.

The browser extension does come with an option to whitelist a certain website temporary, so for example if it uses CoinHive’s Proof of Work Captcha or Shortlinks you can still continue to the next page, and you can still allow the miner on a certain website should you wish to do so by pausing the extension. More importantly you will not be getting your CPU resources used unwillingly and unknowingly by some random website that you end up visiting and that website running the Monero (XMR) web miner that CoinHive provided without your consent.

For now the extension is focused on the CoinHive miner, though it may be further extended to support blocking for other similar web-based miners in the future as well.

– For more information about the No Coin browser extension and to try it out…

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

19, Sep 2017

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…


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