Websites using visitor's computing power to mine Crypto Currencies - Good or Bad?
Would you mind visiting a website which rather than bombarding you with intrusive ads, used your machine's spare computing power instead?
[Image Source: Welivesecurity.com]
- 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
[Image Source: Wikipedia.com]
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
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?
This definitely has potential in the short term. And I think it can have a full long term potential once the underlying mining script exchanges actual computer power to a network where this power will be used directly later (as a utility). Much like the idea behind Golem - but it's embedded in a JavaScript code.
I know right! That computing power can then be used to do other things like running scientific calculations. Future holds so much for blockchain technology.
I don't know much about Golem, what does it do in layman terms?
Not that I'm the best expert in it, but from what I understand, it's a P2P computer power exchange. Through Golem network, you can rent out your computation power (like how you rent out your storage space with Siacoin) and earn GNTs. Or you can buy computation power, as if you're renting servers from AWS.
Doing so through the browser would be even cooler; though I'm not sure if that's technically possible.
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STOPI'd be comfortable if I know the trade off and exactly what do I lose
If the website is ethical, you wouldn't lose anything. That is when they're not greedy enough to use all your resources for mining coins.
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good
Interesting article! I think that informed consent is essential but I agree that this is a valid alternative to the hated banners. I have some gnt ..the idea and the team are great, plus it's ethereum based.
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