Bear market: CryptoTab - mining while browsing and earning some Satoshi

Hello there, after some time I decide to write something new. Actually this topic is not new, but I found it today by accident on twitter. If you are too excited, skip the Preface straight to Intro, to get familiar with CryptoTab.

Preface

Since crypto is trying to survive bear market, it is good time to have a rest from watching graphs and avoid daily depressions. In the case you are not trader, then you should go back to watch candles. But I found finally some time to get back to my personal crypto projects and exploring applications which were born in recent months. For developers I would recommend (except well known Etherum, which became favorite target of every "ethereum killer app" as EOS, ARDR, LSK,...) i found quite interesting Korean project Icon - ICX.

Source: link

Finally I had even time to explore Smartmesh app which allows you to rent your internet connections of mobile device, but be careful if you would like to invest in it, their tokens are in the swapping phase (till 30th September 2018, I guess). Unfortunately it is more China oriented, so I cannot test the app much, but about that maybe next time.

Intro

So, back to the topic. I saw one tweet, which mentioned, that you can earn 30,000 USD per month... errrr.... That's strange. I think that everyone know the rule "if it sounds too good, probably it is". I decided to make a little research and test it by myself what CryptoTab is.

Description

So, what is it? It is web browser. Or even if you do no want to use it as browser, you can try their web app or extension for another browsers like Firefox. They even claims it should be 8 times faster than Chrome. Well, I was not able to notice, but it is not slower (you can verify on online browser speed test).

Basic idea is that it will run mining script on your computer and you will get some small reward. To be honest I did not find any mention on the official home page, but I would expect, it will be similar concept as Coinhive(mining script in JavaScript, which were used on many websites to exploit user's CPU to mine Monero - XMR for web page owner) have, that you will have to pay some fixed percentage fee to creators. As I said it is not mentioned anywhere (red flag?).

Main idea

So far it seems that we are getting closer to original Satoshi vision, which was to let people (anyone with computer) to participate on securing the network by mining. Which is nice, on the other hand if there will be enough people it might lead to the centralization, because of controlling the network by one pool, but we are far away from that now. As I mentioned before, you will get some small amount for letting your CPU to contribute to their mining pool. To have some rough idea for one hour with avg 100H/s you are able to get around 26 Satoshi (which is similar to Freebitco.in and their faucet, where you can claim free Satoshi every hour).

So, where is the promised amount of 30,000 USD? Well, what would you expect? You need to build your network of referrals. Ouch... Honestly, when I see that, it stinks to me. I am not big fan of this. It is true that it work for some people, but usually lot of people leave after while, because of false promises of big profits. I am not talking about this case, but in general. When you need to build your own network of people, to get more for their work, it can lead to disappointment. So, I warned you :) But... how does it work here? They offer a few level of referral's rewards, which mean, you will get even reward for people, who will be brought to the pool by your referral and their referrals, etc. It is explained well in the next picture:

Here you can see scenario, when you have 5 referrals (level 1) and every one have 5 their own referrals (your level 2, their level 1) and so on. The reward is decreasing with the level (referral of referral). An important info about minimal amount to withdraw, it is set to 0.00001 BTC.

Sumary

To sum it up, CryptoTab mines Bitcoin on your CPU, during last hour it performed some work and used my CPU. It added a few satoshi into my account balance. After refresh of the balance page was the balance a little bit reduced, which surprised me. Another think to realize is, that till you do not withdraw your reward, coins are not yours, because you do not have private key (they are stored on CryptoTab side). And you should remember that minimal amount which is allowed to withdraw 0.00001 BTC.

I plan to track it for week. Next week I will share with you results and how much trustworthy this thing is. Have a nice weekend and good luck with crypto.