Show HN: Coinhive – Embeddable JavaScript Crypto Miner

This is much better than I thought it would be. I wonder how many commentors actually tried the demos.<p>Two of the three ways I could see on the page to use it involve delaying the user slightly (while doing a proof of work) after a checkbox or link is clicked. Not constantly running in the background. The one that does constantly run requires clicking a play button, which seems &quot;opt-in&quot; to me.<p>They also have some revenue numbers on there. Though no details on the traffic other than it peeked at 2,000 simultaneous users so that&#x27;s hard to quantify with the data.<p>One big question actually is if you use the captcha system, is it actually effective at proving you are human?<p>Also, the short link one is a little stealthy. But overall it only delayed my experience by a couple seconds so I probably wouldn&#x27;t care unless it happened very often.

I&#x27;ll try it right now on a website with 1k visits per day, with 40 seconds session average.<p>I will report back in a few days

Full 100% load on all CPU threads success ;)<p>Use of Monero (XMR) is an interesting choice. Monero is quickly being adopted as the coin of choice on dark net markets due to its builtin anonymity features. But dedicated third party-services such as escrow, multi-sig, etc have not kept pace with user demand. There seems to be an open window of opportunity for Monero centric contracts and payments.<p>This is definitely an interesting POC and makes an interesting case for why XMR might be ideally suited technically for web microtransactions. With the obvious caveats about hijacking browser performance being opt-in only that others have pointed out of course. Keep going!

This idea has been tried before (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hashcash.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hashcash.io&#x2F;</a>). Question for the developers:<p>1. How is this attempt different from HashCash, aside from using Monero?<p>2. What are you going to do if and when people develop counter strategies to bypass having to do the work?

What a great idea. Seems like a disruptive new revenue model for sites with good content. I wonder if it will be co-opted for use by sites offering pirated content, which raises interesting legal&#x2F;ethical questions since Coinhive keeps 30% of the mining profits (i.e., are they accomplices of the pirates since they are profiting from the illegal acts?)

In theory it could be a revolution I guess, in practice I&#x27;m not sure it would mine enough coin and so generate enough income to be worth it.<p>But having an equivalent using GPU in application like games may be profitable.

I really like this. Not 100% sure how much a user can actually earn in say a 30 minute period but definitely going to try and add this as a form of monetisation in one of my sites and see how users respond.

Show HN: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fireplace.lol" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fireplace.lol</a>

Cant imagine that anyone blocking ads wouldnt also block this

Just an advice, on your landing page, you have a miner ui, showing the hash rate.<p>I wonder if you can change the hash rate to something more understandable, such as USD&#x2F;hr?

The captcha thing is great. I&#x27;m tired of annotating Googles Machine Learning Datasets for them!

I was playing with my own Proof-of-work a couple years ago with a pause every X ms so we don&#x27;t lock the browser while doing the calculations. If someone want&#x27;s a simple introduction to basic hashing on the clientside here is a simple implementation: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;Xeoncross&#x2F;d5a9482e5231db62fb87" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;Xeoncross&#x2F;d5a9482e5231db62fb87</a><p>coin-hive&#x2F;Monero would solve a lot of issues with simple MD5&#x2F;SHA1 implementations like mine (like bot GPU&#x27;s blowing through any kind of hashcash challenge).

I run the demo miner on the coinhive landing page for about 1 minute and chose 1 thread (my laptop has 4 threads). I then noticed that the 100% cpu load kept rotating between the 4 threads that my cpu has. Is this a common behavior in cpu mining (because of cpu pipelining) or is this a feature that the developer implemented? How does this affect the cpu performance and general work load? Is it possible to edit the script to target 50% cpu usage on all threads? Please excuse my ignorance.

It&#x27;s creative approach to content monetization that solves some of the problems associated with ads, such as visual clutter. But mining is a computationally intensive process. So, in a world where this became commonplace, I can&#x27;t see how you could have more than a few websites running on the client, contending for CPU power, without the end-user experience ending up being severely affected - and the revenue that content makers end up getting out of this as well.

It&#x27;s taking more than a minute for me to sign up on Coinhive because of the proof-of-work in their registration form.<p>Definitely a no-no for computers older than 3 years.

Used the library to create a crypto charity. All mined currency will go to the top charity people mined for.<p>www.thoughtsandprayers.io

This is a really good idea, but I&#x27;m not convinced of the Crypto mining side of it.<p>Why not just build a system that allows customers to buy and sell CPU resources, in a similar way to how a ad network allows customers to buy and sell ads?

I think this is a really great idea! I&#x27;d rather have sites do this then bombard me with 10000 banners. Sure it increases my CPU load but I&#x27;d argue it reduces my cognitive load!

I really like this, as there is opt in consent. Perhaps you could default the number of threads to `navigator.getHardwareConcurrency -1`

How much does this earn per user per minute, on average?<p>Any estimtes?

I see this as an excellent way to monetize views and fairly good tradeoff.<p>The issue I see with it, mobile (I tried) is around 10x less. So while it works for desktop, for mobile it would be challenging to use this, on top of draining battery etc.<p>However, this is probably one of the rare unique ideas how to monetize users presence on the site, and as such I welcome it and look forward to see how it will develop.<p>In Chrome I didn&#x27;t notice that tab being out of focus decreases load, so it would work for as long as the site is open.

Wondering if it&#x27;s possible to use GPU instead of&#x2F;in addition to CPU and what would be the impact on performance of site.

How do I self host this? I can&#x27;t deal with the type of overhead needed for validating the captcha across the network..

Can this run in the background without affecting the user? Eg: the UI lagging, laptop fans turning to max, etc.

I&#x27;ve heard some using MinerGate web mining in this way. Now, those same people can use Coin-Hive.

Running on 2015 Mac with Chrome, I got 75 H&#x2F;s<p>At the current exchange rate, that&#x27;s about $3.78&#x2F;month.

If this is not clearly opt-in I wish those responsible for using it on their site a slow and painful death.<p>Performance and bloat in browsers are a huge problem and having this constantly running in the background (without consent) is an absolute nightmare.

So, what would I need to change to mine on my account rather than their account. I like their home page top fold but I want to mine for myself. The service must be going through a pool of some sort?

I love this idea, congratulations on the launch.

This is a brilliant idea! I could see it being used with Nimiq- a project in development for a browser-based blockchain...This could provide more profitable mining.<p>This is also the direction I wanted to see BAT to go in- getting rid of paywalls and ads in exchange for a basic return to the publisher and user based on duration spent on the site along with interaction.

why not webassembly? it could be ~10 times speedup.

This is a novel method of monetisation. Instead of a paywall users could have the option to mine for the duration of their use of the content.