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Comment by hopfog | Hacker News Reader

When Coinhive was released I was really intrigued and imagined a lot of cool way of doing micropayments. I even built a multiplayer game where you had to mine in order to get in-game credits (you can find the URL in my comment history), which was fairly well received by the players.

It was a proof-of-concept and when I saw that it worked I started building a proper version of it. However, soon thereafter rogue actors started using Coinhive for malicious things and I'm now at a point where I don't feel like continuing on the game. I still think it's a cool concept and my game is very clearly opt-in where I explain what will happen when you press "Start mining".

It feels like "this is why we can't have nice things" is applicable here.

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Agreed, I initially felt good about coinhive too. I just wanted it to allow to rate limit cpu consumption, it would have been a great alternative to advertisement.

Maybe someone will come later with a idea to make this while preventing abuses (maybe browsers could built it in as a mean of payment?).

> I just wanted it to allow to rate limit cpu consumption

Can't it already do that? The demo miner on their website has controls for "CPU Usage Percentage" and "Number of cores used".

Nice, thanks for letting me know - I haven't check it for ages. There is definitely a proper use possible of this, then :)

You may find it less palatable, but I could totally see the 'free to play' games going down the road of cryptocurrency mining.

As your project did before, you could tie the mining with in game currency. If the underlying block chain is actively traded you could even scale the game currency with real currency in some way... 0.0001 cent is a gold coin for example. Payment that way would seem fairly above board, especially if you clearly tell the player about the taxing system -- this could then be your funding.

I think most people would even prefer that to ads, I'd much rather have you utilize 30% of my CPU for a while than make me watch an ad.

On mobile that is bit more difficult. But even there: I'd rather have my battery drained by a clear, transparant miner than through spying and data-mining ads.

Though, in reality, I'd rather not have my battery drained at all; so I'd disable this when not plugged in. Or for desktop only.

This exists and is called huntercoin. The hard part for the human mining is coming up with a game that bots are worse at than humans, so it is still under development: http://huntercoin.org/

Soon (next month or so) the same team are releasing a multi-game coin as well: https://chimaera.io/

> However, soon thereafter rogue actors started using Coinhive for malicious things and I'm now at a point where I don't feel like continuing on the game.

Can you expand on this? How are they using it maliciously in your game?

Also, did you get a sense for whether it's a viable alternative to ads?

«actors started using Coinhive for malicious things»

I don't understand how this made you lose interest in your game. These malicious uses have nothing to do with you or your game...

It's the association risk. As much as we like to say there shouldn't be any guilt in association, humans aren't really wired that way.

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