ThePirateBay.org is making users mine Bitcoins
pirates-forum.org
pirates-forum.org
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?
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.
When I did the experiment I thought it was a good deal for users.
Also I had a (sort of) premium plan that allowed to pay a small fee (2€/month to remove the ads and get some extra featues. When I made the BTC mining experiment they still had the option to choose between the free plan (BTC mining) or paying 2€ to get it removed.
Please, see my comment above.
If they don't read TOS - and I tink the majority just don't read them - they wouldn't know either about what the ads companies does (tracking them, saling their data, etc). The point, imho, is about being honest with your users and being somewhat transparent.
>As for newsletter, only your subscribers might have got that. How do you know the avast thing dint happen from a non-subscriber who never bothered to read ToS?
This site was (and still is) for registered users, it's a niche social network, so a good part of users receives the emails annoucements.
>b. Did you have a popup or statement in the header stating the mining experiment? Something which clearly showed the user what you were doing?
Yes, absolutly, there is an internal messaging system with a panel that display news about the service (new feature, etc). Registered users would get the notifications as soon as they logged. Unregistered visitors didn't have the bitcoins miner loaded at all.
>c. I surely would like to see an Ad which is as CPU or memory intensive as the JS miner. I can't speak for the one you used but the one in question here can spike up to 70-80% of my CPU without my consent. Most sites I visit like HN, WSJ, Bloomberg etc don't have that heavy ads.
Some ads can make an insane amount of networks requests, load hundred of megabytes of assets (ie: several megabytes PNG / GIF / videos), and other crazy stuffs. It can easily consume your cpu, ram, battery, internet data...
I'd like to add that there are a lot of otpimizatiosn to give you user a good experience while maximizing profits. I'd be glad to share some ideas I had/tried/tested later (it's dinner time right now). :)
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.
Six years ago:
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.
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...
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.
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.
Our miner uses WebAssembly and runs with about 65% of the performance of a native Miner.
to block all third party connections unless required. It will stop the coin-hive mining script.
https://coin-hive.com/account/signup
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.
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.
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?
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".
Bitcoin mining is not economical anymore for minor miners, which is why we have mining pools, but there are other cryptocurencies that are just starting out and need miners. Not sure if you're aware but everytime a new promising altcoin starts out GPU mining does work for a bit in the early days. And then it doesn't.
My point was if you could identify these promising altcoins during the early stages it may make sense. I said nothing about using Bitcoin to do this.
That's exactly what it was made for. But the creators had the foresight to adjust the difficulty factor automatically as the hashrate - inevitably - would increase and this means that even though the speed with which GPU, FPGA and later ASIC based mining probably wasn't foreseen it still managed to remain relevant.
Sure with GPUs this might change but JS is not ideal for this at the moment.
They are connect to some sort of centralised server or perhaps just scrap the DHT themselves. For such operators, having alternative source of income is quite awesome. The problem is that they do not interact long with website, someone like Facebook would be much more useful.
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...
It seems the spike in last month has been huge. All thanks to this miner?
Why is computer memory getting more expensive? DDR4 is now almost twice more expensive compared to 2016...