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ThePirateBay.org is making users mine Bitcoins
- piracyde25 9y agoThis would make a good selling point for freelance website developer. "Make people come to website, to pay bills"
- ejcx 9y agoI won't begin to pretend that I'm a lawyer, but ESEA was fined $1MM for this not too long ago: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/20/esea_gaming_bitcoin_fine/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/20/esea_gaming_bitcoin...
- Hydraulix989 9y agoI don't think Pirate Bay cares about operating above the law.
- sowbug 9y agoSomething tells me TPB won't be deterred by fines.
- brad0 9y agoOkay, I'm going to play devil's advocate here. What if this was legal? It could be an alternative way to pay for website costs. We get rid of ads and replace it with a client side miner.
- aaron-lebo 9y agoThis discussion comes up every once in awhile. It's horribly inefficient. Six years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2566365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2566365 Additionally, does this automatically hook in to slush's pool or something? Bitcoin mining is practically useless on CPU; even the fastest CPUs out get way, way less than 10mhash. The average length of time to find a block at 9999khash and current difficulty is 1200+ days, so even that estimate is over-optimistic, so this isn't worth anything if your users don't sit on your site for 5 years+, unless it's hooked into a pool or some other contraption to pay on shares instead of blocks. It hasn't gotten better.
- dzhiurgis 9y agoIDK man, YouTube tries to force people into their inefficient video format, burning way more power because they refuse to pay for x264 licensing.
- mirashii 9y agoNo on both fronts. Youtube does transcode to H.264 (which is the format which requires licensing, x264 is an open source encoder that outputs H.264 encoded video). There are a variety of chrome extensions and similar which will allow you to select H.264 on the majority of Youtube videos if you so choose, much of youtube's content is available in h264 as well as other formats. Second, the reason that they default to VP9 is because it is a better low-bandwidth experience. It's certainly a tradeoff against power usage with H.264 since hardware acceleration for H.264 decoding is often available, but it is a calculated tradeoff based on the fact that people want their videos to load faster and in higher quality. You can read a little bit more about that here. https://youtube-eng.googleblog.com/2015/04/vp9-faster-better-buffer-free-youtube.html https://youtube-eng.googleblog.com/2015/04/vp9-faster-better...
- dzhiurgis 9y agoYeah forgot to mention it's 4K h264 thats not available anymore. And they do still force VP8/9 on you, regardless of your network or hardware. p.s. did checked coin-hive.com and hash rate is really poor - 24h/s on a 4 core machine is truly nothing compared to modern hardware miners.
- dannyw 9y agoWe are talking about Monero. Also, give it time to ramp up. I get more h/s on my iPhone.
- foepys 9y agoNewer graphic chips also have VP.9 hardware decoding support. Even Intel's integrated graphics and smartphone SoCs support it. It just needs to catch on, like H.264 hardware decoding had to.
- muzani 9y agoYeah, I wonder if I can run this on some apps. Just tell people up front - this app mines crypto, pay $1 to shut it off.
- ddmma 9y agoWhat if google or facebook would have this on their embed code?!
- IncRnd 9y agoThey'd mine a few tons more by using native miners on their own servers instead of javascript on all the clients.
- jacquesm 9y agoThey probably don't, but how can you be sure without auditing each and every js embed that you download?
- ddmma 9y agowith the state of js these days... everything is possible
- kungito 9y agoSeeing as how slow Facebook app is, they are probably mining both Bitcoin and Ethereum
- lgas 9y agoWhat makes you think it's illegal?
- pmorici 9y agoSome MIT students were harassed by the government when they built the idea at a hackathon a few years back.
- brad0 9y agoCould you provide a link? I wasn't able to find anything.
- pmorici 9y agohttps://www.wired.com/2014/09/mit-students-face-aggressive-subpoena-demanding-source-code-bitcoin-mining-tool/ https://www.wired.com/2014/09/mit-students-face-aggressive-s...
- lgas 9y agoI would consider this evidence of massive overreach on the part of law enforcement rather than evidence that it's illegal (which afaict it still is not).
- em3rgent0rdr 9y agoThe idea to use bitcoin mining in place of ad revenue has been tried before (unfortunately the state of New Jersey didn't like it): https://venturebeat.com/2014/02/12/new-jersey-slaps-mit-bitcoin-hackers-with-subpoena-and-theyre-fighting-back/ https://venturebeat.com/2014/02/12/new-jersey-slaps-mit-bitc...
- mrb 9y agoActually New Jersey changed their mind. They didn't follow up with their investigation and concluded "we do not believe Tidbit was created for the purpose of invading privacy." https://www.eff.org/cases/rubin-v-new-jersey-tidbit https://www.eff.org/cases/rubin-v-new-jersey-tidbit
- marian0_ 9y agoIf this included they kind of code in a big % of websites, wouldn't this make the difficulty of getting new blocks so high that it would become an inefficient way of mining?
- icelancer 9y agoIt appears that it is Monero, not BTC.
- mathgenius 9y agoMining monero would make much more sense than BTC. (Apparently monero mining uses alot of memory and so can't easily be ASIC-ed.)
- danthejam 9y agoOf course you can block coinhive.min.js with your ad blocker to avoid this. Or just use NoScript.
- cocktailpeanuts 9y agoI know people will say this is inefficient, but based on the current climate I think this may have potential if: 1. The service provider (Coinhive) used not just BTC but all kinds of cryptocurrency 2. they make sure they switch over to the most lucrative cryptocurrency at the moment in realtime 3. makes sure the user (In this case thepiratebay) can cash out immediately, as in every day. In this case, mining as a business model may make sense. I think it's impressive that they built something like this to begin with.
- aaron-lebo 9y agoBTC isn't made to be mined on consumer machines and it hasn't been profitable for like 6-7 years. You are basically heating the planet for nothing. Unless the person has a decent GPU and the currency supports that, it's still worthless, but it's a lot of trouble (and disrespectful to unaware users). But you're talking about a business plan that relies on new, worthless, speculative currencies to come and go for the next decade. Does anyone benefit from that? Does that sound stable?
- cocktailpeanuts 9y agoThat's why i said there should be a way to cash out immediately. Of course if you were actually to do something like this, it will require a lot of thought, and I personally won't touch anything like this because I don't believe in junk currencies and would rather spend my time working on something meaningful. But I think the idea itself is interesting and worth thinking about instead of just discounting it as "not efficient".
- IncRnd 9y agoIt is well thought out. Today, bitcoin is mined on ASICs. GPUs and CPUs do not provide enough processing power, since they are not efficient at this algorithm in comparison to ASICs that are purpose made for this algorithm.
- cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
- thisisit 9y agoUse uMatrix from gorhill: https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix to block all third party connections unless required. It will stop the coin-hive mining script.
- unixhero 9y agoLol, now that is a cranky maintainer.
- kibwen 9y agoReminder that if anyone's too lazy (or too paranoid) to download an extension that disables Javascript, you can do so manually via about:config in Firefox by toggling the "javascript.enabled" preference.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jankotek 9y ago> DO "THEY" REALLY SAY: "TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS IS SLOWING DOWN"? Why is computer memory getting more expensive? DDR4 is now almost twice more expensive compared to 2016...
- thejynxed 9y agoBecause supply availability has decreased as it always does when there are major purchase orders made by everyone from Samsung to Apple.
- niklabh 9y agoThis must be some incompetent developer who didn't even added the script tag.
- mbi 9y agoA friend of mine has written a very popular open-source JavaScript library and has been hosting a copy on his website. Turns out that a few high-volume news sites have started using the library, but instead of downloading a copy and serving it themselves, they've been hotlinking the one on his website. As a result he is getting several million hits a day on his library's js file, directly from these website's pages. We've been tempted to include a JavaScript miner in the library he is hosting, but we're unsure of the legal implications, i.e. would the fact that he's hosting the file on his website and that the other websites have simply hotlinked it, be a valid defense?
- SolarNet 9y agoIt's your server. Change the terms ahead of time with like a two week notice.
- 0x4a42 9y agoI did an experiment like this in 2011 on one of my websites. The sites was free to use for the end users but had a few ads (between 0 and up to 3 depending on the pages and sections). I wanted to see if I could replace the ads with a bitcoins miner and get enough revenues to continue operating the service. FYI I was making about 900€ per month at the moment. So I installed a JavaScript miner, removed the ads and waited. The result I got was unexpected: Avast Antivirus (very popular among my visitors) flagged the site and blocked it's access. I immediatly lost about hald of the traffic. I tried with a few other opensource miners and the sentence was the same every times: users locked out by zealous anti-virus and traffic cut off by (at least) half.
- marian0_ 9y agoZealous antivirus? More like good antivirus...
- 0x4a42 9y agoWhy do you think that? Compared to ads that are heavy on the user's network and CPU, track them, get them tons of unwated spams and other shaddy stuffs; why do you think giving some CPU power for a background miner is any worst? When I did the experiment I thought it was a good deal for users.
- lewisl9029 9y agoI found the Proof of Work Captcha on Coinhive's signup page to be quite interesting: https://coin-hive.com/account/signup https://coin-hive.com/account/signup https://coin-hive.com/info/captcha-help https://coin-hive.com/info/captcha-help I'm not super familiar with the inner workings of the world of spam protection, but I'm curious if people think increasing the cost of spamming through extra workload for the machine as opposed to the human in this manner would be helpful to deter spammers in general? Seems like the lack of a human intervention requirement means that the spamming workflow can still be automated, but maybe the extra workload could cut into profits/throughput enough to make the site an unattractive target? The other aspect of a solution like this where you can potentially recoup part of the damage done by spamming through their contribution to your mining operation, so you say hire a human moderator, is super interesting as well.
- thisisit 9y agoI have been doing some back envelope calculation on this. Using the formula on the coin hive website and the current difficulty. At an average of 60 h/s per user you need 2k users to run the miner for 24hrs straight * 30 days to get any where near the 60 XMR promised in the example. That is not to say the example is incorrect. Rather the difficulty in Monero has doubled in last month alone. In that case those 2k users needed to run this miner for 12 hours. Tthe average increase in the difficulty on Monero is also surprising. Chart here: https://www.coinwarz.com/difficulty-charts/monero-difficulty-chart https://www.coinwarz.com/difficulty-charts/monero-difficulty... It seems the spike in last month has been huge. All thanks to this miner?