It's really hard for me to understand why it failed as they seemed to be the PERFECT alternative to running ads. The official statement doesn't really cut it for me, what are your thoughts on this?
I'm not sure how it's a perfect alternative. It seems worse on almost every dimension.<p>You're stuck between running this miner covertly (scummy) or asking for permission (who is going to click yes?).<p>How much of Coinhive's income comes from users who are unknowingly running the code? It seems like a move towards more user-hostility, not less.<p>The one time I saw an actual fit for the end user was an online game that would let you turn on the miner to win in-game coins. Who else can pull off an opt-in?
The performance disparity between browser-based javascript and specialized mining hardware is so large, that you will be hard-pressed to generate enough revenue to support a website.
Well, for one, AV software started to classify any website with its code as 'infected' with malware. Then adblockers blocked their script, and even today their website doesn't load properly with uBlock activated.
Spamming the adblockers to whitelist them (and their authedmine alternative) definitely didn't help <a href="https://github.com/easylist/easylist/issues/712" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/easylist/easylist/issues/712</a>
The real reason they failed (mining efficiency aside) is because the technology was co-opted by criminals that embedded the miner into hacked sites and display advertisements without permission. This caused them to land on every single anti-virus and domain blacklist out there.
I was still working in the security field (MSSP SOC) when Coinhive came out. It quickly because one of the prominent "threats" we had to deal with. All of our clients wanted any site that had Coinhive on it, whether or not the site owners added it or criminals did, blocked. It was view by nearly everyone in cyber security, including AV companies, as malware. It got a bad reputation because many sites didn't allow you to opt-in, and many didn't even tell you they were running it.
This is a particularly bad experience for mobile users with battery and CPU cooling limitations to computing.<p>While the growth of mobile probably wasn't a primary reason, I suspect the founders may have seen that the future didn't look great, even if they could solve the monetization of exploits and collapse of crypto prices overall headwinds. With crypto pricing falling to near the power input costs when mined on ASICs and GPUs, CPU mining from Javascript was going to be a case where users paid $1 for ~$0.10 of crypto which only a tiny sliver of the original input ($1) went to the content creator.
A million CPUs would not be as efficient mining Bitcoin as a single ASIC. There are no coins where CPU mining is as good as GPU. JavaScript is also inefficient compared to native programs.<p>Overall, it probably didn't generate very much money. Mining is a commodity. An ad click is worth orders of magnitude more.
Speculating here, but a browser JS engine is not the ideal mining vehicle, particularly on mobile. I think you would have to have enormous volume to actually make any money. A significant amount of that would then go to the site owner (why else would they use it?), leaving very little profit for CoinHive itself.
I think in most cases “failed” just means the founders think there are other (clearer) opportunities to pursue. Doesn’t necessarily mean what they were working on didn’t make sense.<p>IMHO there still is quite an opportunity to find substitutes for ads that provide revenue for websites and aren’t as annoying as ads whether it is mining or something like SETI or something like re-captcha.<p>Would love to see more in this direction.
Just adding a datapoint. I run a SaaS where people can run their own (Javascript) code. The first thing I did was block any Coinhvive script as those were the first obvious abusers of the service.<p>Coinhive is now, for me at least, always associated with scammers.
This is a big question for me too! Especially since they didn't seem to have any major reason to burn a lot of cash or to run out of money! Was it maybe a lawsuit, fraud or regulatory issue? I would LOVE to know.