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Mining is incredibly inefficient and mining this way is insanely inefficient. The energy cost of a single Bitcoin transaction could power 1.5 American homes fo

Mining is incredibly inefficient and mining this way is insanely inefficient. The energy cost of a single Bitcoin transaction could power 1.5 American homes for a day. That was in 2015. ASICs are more efficient than GPUs which are orders of magnitude more efficient than your browser. This is an unbelievably stupid idea. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ae3p7e/bitcoin-is-unsustainable https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ae3p7e/bitcoin-is... Edit: yes, this uses Monero rather than Bitcoin. The work required is less and the price is also less. The argument is the same. This is inherently inefficient because if you could remove this inefficiency, the price would drop.

mrb 9y ago
You seem confused. They aren't mining bitcoins, but Monero which is relatively efficient to mine on CPU, and another new one called JSEcoin which appears to have been designed specifically for efficient mining in javascript.
seveibar 9y ago
As I understand it, coinhive uses Monero, a crytocurrency that is hard to mine on GPUs. From coinhive.com: Monero is different. To mine Monero, you have to calculate hashes with an algorithm called Cryptonight. This algorithm is very compute heavy and – while overall pretty slow – was designed to run well on consumer CPUs. There are solutions to run the Cryptonight algorithm on a GPU instead, but the benefit is about 2x, not 10000x like for other algorithms used by Bitcoin or Ethereum. This makes Cryptonight a nice target for JavaScript and the Browser. Of course, when running through JavaScript performance still takes a bit of a toll, but it's not that bad. Our miner uses WebAssembly and runs with about 65% of the performance of a native Miner. For an Intel i7 CPU (one of the fastest desktop CPUs) you should see a hashrate of about 90h/s. A native miner would get to 140h/s.
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KGIII 9y ago
I doubt efficiency is their primary concern. It seems that it is more likely to be efficacy that concerns them most. Namely, does it generate more income than it would without it? The answer to that is probably yes. After all, it isn't their resources. They are simply adding a line of code to their markup and calling it a day. I see no problem with this so long as they get consent and, ideally, allow a method to opt out, though the back button is opting out. I'd also mention that it should be informed consent. In plain language, the user should be aware of what is happening.
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mrb 9y ago

You seem confused. They aren't mining bitcoins, but Monero which is relatively efficient to mine on CPU, and another new one called JSEcoin which appears to have been designed specifically for efficient mining in javascript.

seveibar 9y ago

As I understand it, coinhive uses Monero, a crytocurrency that is hard to mine on GPUs. From coinhive.com: Monero is different. To mine Monero, you have to calculate hashes with an algorithm called Cryptonight. This algorithm is very compute heavy and – while overall pretty slow – was designed to run well on consumer CPUs. There are solutions to run the Cryptonight algorithm on a GPU instead, but the benefit is about 2x, not 10000x like for other algorithms used by Bitcoin or Ethereum. This makes Cryptonight a nice target for JavaScript and the Browser. Of course, when running through JavaScript performance still takes a bit of a toll, but it's not that bad. Our miner uses WebAssembly and runs with about 65% of the performance of a native Miner. For an Intel i7 CPU (one of the fastest desktop CPUs) you should see a hashrate of about 90h/s. A native miner would get to 140h/s.

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KGIII 9y ago

I doubt efficiency is their primary concern. It seems that it is more likely to be efficacy that concerns them most. Namely, does it generate more income than it would without it? The answer to that is probably yes. After all, it isn't their resources. They are simply adding a line of code to their markup and calling it a day. I see no problem with this so long as they get consent and, ideally, allow a method to opt out, though the back button is opting out. I'd also mention that it should be informed consent. In plain language, the user should be aware of what is happening.

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