Who and what is Coinhive?

<i>&quot;But according to Troy Mursch, a security expert who spends much of his time tracking Coinhive and other instances of “cryptojacking,” killing the key doesn’t do anything to stop Coinhive’s code from continuing to mine Monero on a hacked site. Once a key is invalidated, Mursch said, Coinhive keeps 100 percent of the cryptocurrency mined by sites tied to that account from then on.&quot;</i><p>This is where I think Coinhive ethically crosses the line; perhaps legally, too. The mining scripts should stop when contacting Coinhive and determining that the specified key&#x2F;ID has been disabled due to complaints or fraud.

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.<p>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&#x27;m now at a point where I don&#x27;t feel like continuing on the game. I still think it&#x27;s a cool concept and my game is very clearly opt-in where I explain what will happen when you press &quot;Start mining&quot;.<p>It feels like &quot;this is why we can&#x27;t have nice things&quot; is applicable here.

<i>”For roughly a week in January, Coinhive was found hidden inside of YouTube advertisements (via Google’s DoubleClick platform)”</i>.<p>I’m shocked, and very surprised to hear that malware code is disseminated through innocent ads put out there by a user-loving, “do no evil” company. &#x2F;s<p>Now, can we please finally conclude that an ad blocker in your browser is mandatory?

Has anyone found attempts to deobfuscate the coinhive source code? Maybe my google-fu needs improvement...<p>I found a github page that provides a proxy to the coinhive allowing the user to keep 100% of the profit, but it doesn&#x27;t even link to the coinhive code that I could see. (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cazala&#x2F;coin-hive-stratum" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cazala&#x2F;coin-hive-stratum</a>)<p>Also found this, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jonathanmh.com&#x2F;testing-coin-hive-crowd-source-monero-mining&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jonathanmh.com&#x2F;testing-coin-hive-crowd-source-monero...</a>. Interesting but no source code.

Found Dr. Matthias Moench to be the real gem in this story. Here is the translated version of the Die Welt article:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;translate.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;translate_c?depth=1&amp;hl=en&amp;nv=1&amp;rurl=translate.google.com&amp;sl=auto&amp;sp=nmt4&amp;tl=en&amp;u=https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.welt.de&#x2F;wirtschaft&#x2F;article135077209&#x2F;Viagra-ist-fuer-Gangster-heute-lukrativer-als-Kokain.html&amp;xid=25657,15700022,15700043,15700105,15700124,15700126,15700149,15700168,15700186,15700201&amp;usg=ALkJrhj30tQD5O_BVoUt00qDsfxMLHZhPg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;translate.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;translate_c?depth=1&amp;...</a>

It&#x27;s unfortunate that Coinhive has given this type of monetization a bad reputation; at least their shady practices make it that much easier for a competitor to enter this space. I hope that someone can come along with a transparent mining script that has an expidient abuse resolution process, and no tracking. Hopefully that&#x27;s enough to overcome the stigma now associated with this type of monetization. I would certainly prefer that to regular ads.

The pr0gramm.com-admins spend the whole day banning users that upload screenshots of this article to the platform.

Why is Coinhive seemingly the sole option for this tool? If it&#x27;s just code, what is to stop a different group of devs to replicate the process?

Just a heads up - we, Hashcash.io, working on V2 of our product which will incorporate some bits discussed here: mining and currency and micropayments with new blockchain and PoW approach. We applied to YC18 summer batch, but either way we are going to launch it, it will just depend how soon.<p>If you are interested - leave an email on website :)

Here is a followup post to the article. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16696865" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16696865</a>