Bitcoin Forum

As mentioned in the JS miner (http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=9042) thread, I would like to collect websites here that use pitp.it or any other form of JS/WebCL miner. The problem is websites that don't ask or even NOTIFY their users that they are using the user's electricity, computational power, and battery life. For really, really bad hash rates even (a few thousand hashes per second on a modern computer, lol!). I believe doing this will massively harm Bitcoin's reputation for the average user, and I want to prevent this by showing website owners using such miners in an illegitimate way that it's not okay.

Note that this thread is not against websites that give their users a choice in this matter. For instance, enabling the user to get rid of ads by mining bitcoins instead is fine if you give your users a choice in this matter. But we certainly don't need an internet where you constantly have to monitor your CPU activity to check if they are mining bitcoins without your consent.

I would encourage everyone to discuss these miners only in the other thread (http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=9042) and keep this one for collecting websites. Yes, this is a pillory, as the thread title says.

I'll start:
http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html bitp.it was removed, website owner saw it was a bad idea. :) That was fast!

Bitbid.net (http://www.bitbid.net/) Was running the miner without informing users or obtaining consent. Since it was brought to light a few days ago, the script has been pulled and is no longer being run.
Just adding it to the list as...
A. a warning for possible future use
B. to add to the list and help illustrate exactly how many sites are doing this without users consent.

http://www.google.com/search?q=bitpit({clientId%3A+})

Shows quite a few sites already, I don't want to list all of them here...

bitbid.net (http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=10761.msg154938#msg154938) has removed the bitp.it miner.

Hm. I am not sure.
It doesn cause a huge load on my cpu, and I think  energy used for it will cost nothing (murch cheaper then $0.001) for a website user.
Should we see the problem here?

* drains battery life on mobile devices
* is often integrated invisilbly and intransparent to the user
* has a non-open backend - who knows where you get your work units from?! Do you pool-hop unknowingly with this?

In the end most likely (I guess since it can be done, it will be done!) you will be able to have a setting in your browser in th future that gives only x seconds of total CPU time to each jscript or something like that.

Bitcoin Porn (http://bitcoinporn.tumblr.com/) at least notifies their users, but still doesn't give them any choice in the matter.

why should they? they announce it the users and that's enough. On sites with usual ads you are also not given the choice to turn them off. that's what adblock is for.

http://www.guiabitcoin.com/  <-- spanish blog, they use the JSMiner without telling the user

They should because they are using the user's electricity. They are taking money out of the website viewer's pocket every second that the user is on the site. A lot of less computer savvy users will not realize that this is what is happening, and therefore this is an unethical practice.

Some websites use bitcoin generation as an alternative for advertisement. If you really think about it, advertisements generally waste a lot of your time since you need to either watch a stupid video or fill a nonsense survey or ... Therefore, although these websites might use your electricity to generate bitcoin, they might be able to potentially reduce the advertisements and increase the quality of the content that you see in the website.

There is a big difference between a few adverts and 100% CPU use.