Can anyone explain to me like I'm a five year old why would anyone need to block coin miners on their browser and why they would be mining there in the first place?
They are used because the coins that are mined can be sold and the money used to pay for hosting and food.
Mining makes the battery die quicker.
They are mining to make money so they can buy food.
A silly man pays the bad man money for the tiny baby numbers they find in your phone when they mine it.
You can still watch Frozen. The battery isn't dead yet.
- A website author can include a script for their _users_ to mine coins for the website author, which effectively distributes work across many machines you don't own.
- This means, instead of mining on just your own machine, you're effectively mining across N machines (however many users you have) as long as they have your website open (at a ~60% efficiency rate according to other comments).
- This is great for the website author, as it's very little effort on their behalf for a small profit, and affects each individual user less than the whole.
Why someone would want to block coin miners:
- Mining is very CPU intensive, which can slow down the browser for users.
- Increased CPU usage can also lead to higher electricity bills
- Increased CPU usage can also lead to lower battery life
- Someone might also not want to benefit the owner of a website they're visiting, especially if it's at any cost to them (electricity bills, battery, cpu, etc)
Coin mining uses a lot of resources, which costs you electricity and responsiveness (I’d guess).
Without disclosure/client choice it could slow down someone's computer and and be portrayed as malicious ("If they can mine potentially valuable coins while I'm on the site, what else could they be doing while serving my browser content?")