Would you mind visiting a website which rather than bombarding you with intrusive ads, used your machine's spare computing power instead?

Few websites are starting to experiment with this idea to compete with the new ad-blocker driven web environment. But as good an idea it sounds to the content creators of the web, It still needs to answer a few fundamental questions, before it goes mainstream.

Is it even ethical to use a visitor's computing power?

How much of the available resources is the website going to use?

Will the mining code run indefinitely while the user is on the website, or is there some quota after reaching which, it would stop?

Can the miner run even after the user has closed all the tabs of the website? Here are a couple of examples of big names, who recently integrated mining scripts in the source code of their websites. CBS's Showtime



[Image Source: Wikipedia.com]

The websites of US TV cable giant CBS's Showtime contained JavaScript code to secretly commandeered viewers' web browsers to mine Monero (a privacy-focused alternative to the ever-popular Bitcoin). The hidden JavaScript code allowed the website to blow spare processor time in mining and typically consumed as much as 60 per cent of Computing Power on computers visiting the sites.











Though they silently pulled the mining code from the websites, and it's extremely unlikely that a large corporation would do such a thing without informing it's users, especially since it's already a subscription based service. It's likely that someone hacked or inserted the mining code to make a few quick coins.

The Pirate Bay

"Donate Bitcoin" option, but it wasn't enough to cover the operating costs, mainly because most of the visitors don't own the crypto currency, and out of those who do, only a very small percentage of users are kind enough to donate any significant amount. Few years ago, popular torrent and file sharing sites added theoption, but it wasn't enough to cover the operating costs, mainly because most of the visitors don't own the crypto currency, and out of those who do, only a very small percentage of users are kind enough to donate any significant amount. The Pirate Bay was the one to lead the way in accepting Bitcoin donations, and recently they started experiments to generate money by borrowing visitor's computational power to mine Monero (XMR). The site was considerate enough to not to be resource hungry and limited the amount of computational power used. It was throttled at different rates (0.6 to 0.8) and the increase in resources was immediately noticeable. The mining script was not enabled site wide.

JavaScript Mining Code: Coin-Hive







The JavaScript Miner code is written by Coin-Hive, a legit provider of scripts to website owners. Webmasters can then add these scripts to the source code of their pages, allowing them to earn slivers of cash from each visitor as an alternative to ad based revenue model. Over a period of time, money mined by the Coin-Hive-hosted scripts adds up and is transferred from Coin Hive to the site's administrators.

Currently Coin-Hive supports Monero (1 XMR, is worth around $93 right now), mainly because underlying algorithm in Monero is designed to run well on consumer CPUs, and using high end GPUs doesn't provide a very huge advantage as opposed to other coins.

Mining Blockers (😂)

Yeah so, Mining Blockers are already a thing to prevent websites from abusing this great idea of borrowing Computational Power to monetize their content.



Checkout this awesome Open Source Project: NoCoin [Github]

Ethics and Conclusion

From a user's perspective, I think using a coin miner in browser to monetize content is a great idea, as long as the Websites don't abuse it.

I'd be interested in supporting the idea if the following points are taken care of:

Asking visitor for consent, just like those cookie thingies appear everywhere on the internet.

Throttling the computational power usage to less than 50%, so that the resources are available for the user to use, and mining is not really noticeable.

Only mining for a limited period of time, defined by some type of quota. I don't want a coin miner constantly running if I stay on a website for, say 10 hours.





The idea has a real potential if used correctly, and the website owners will not have to rely on intrusive and sometimes weird ads to monetize the content they create.

How comfortable are you with the idea?