Bitcoin Forum

I've just read this on Kitco. I've checked all my notebooks, and I can't find any traces. I guess that means I'm living a boring life. :)

http://www.kitco.com/news/2017-10-16/Over-500-Million-People-Are-Unknowingly-Mining-Cryptos.html

In Slovenia some e-news are mininig while you are reading the news on the internet.

This is a worrying development imo.
I'm already suspicious when I hear intensity increase while visiting a website.

that just mean browser plugins like nocoin, antiminer will be widely installed just like ad blocker plugin, also adblock plugins will be aim to include these in the list as well. However, how to stop first party mining may still be a challenge.

You'll never find any traces because none are left ;)

These browser-based mining scripts are written in JavaScript, which means they are just running out of the box in your browser, without any need to install anything. It also means they are only running as long as you are on the website in question.

How about google chrome running in the background after closing the browser? they could keep mining as long as your computer is on, I need a plugin to detect these mining sites and then stops them. this explains the hash rate of coins changing every second, people come and go. imagine if 500 million people could use 50% of their CPU knowingly, could the hash power grow even bigger than Bitcoin's? mild lol.

There are more and more sites that use up a lot of my CPU.

Google Chrome running in the background after closing the browser is not website scripts running in the background. You'd probably have to ask Chrome's dev team for what is actually happening, but my educated guess would be mostly garbage collection and update processes. Either way, a website can't simply run JavaScript in the background once it is closed, that's simply not how this technology works. If you want to stay safe from browser-based mining just run JavaScript blocking extensions such as ScriptSafe and you'll be fine.

Hashrate fluctuations are more likely due to miners pointing their hashrate to whatever coin is currently most profitable to mine, this is not a new phenomenon. According to the link these sites made USD 43,000,- within 3 weeks, which equals about 500 XMR @ USD 86,- which makes XMR 23.81 a day. With the current XMR network difficulty and block reward that requires about 1.3MHs which is about 0.5% of XMR's hashrate. Of course XMR is only an example here and some variables may have slightly changed since AdGuard collected their statistics, but that should give an idea about how much (or how little) hashrate we're actually talking here.



Yeah, you can thank bad coding practices and questionable design choices for that...

This is quite interesting and enlightening at the same time.
I wouldn't have thought the mining number would have been that large.
What about the new ICO electroneum where they are bringing mobile phone mining alive,
this will or could greatly expand that number if it happens

I'm not surprised that mostly torrents, porn and similar sites using miners in background. It's more difficult to monetize such websites and finally they found alternative. If miner set at low CPU usage, maybe it can be better than tons of popups for many users. But if they set high CPU usage and don't warn users about it, people are risking to overheat their devices while visiting such website.
And I remember that uTorrent few users ago secretly mined bitcoins in background without user consent.
Now I'm using one addon which blocks CoinHive miner, but it doesn't helps always.

These JavaScript miners are a pain in the ass as you will only realise you were mining when you have a look at your CPU usage graph which will usually be above 70%. Its really a sad happening that websites are resorting to these tactics for some quick money, mind you even sites with very high traffic are barely making anything at all.

Just disable javascript on untrusted websites it can be a pain to navigate sometimes but it needs to be done to stop this sort of thing

I recently read in the news that Thepiratebay a peer to peer sharing site has been doing that to a lot of people downloading torrents from their website but people can't take any legal option against them since the website is even illegal in the first place.

Most of the people will have no clue about disabling javascript. There are more people who don't know ADBlocker (usually the old generation and those who don't know about the background of browsers and internet), so they will be easy money for the mining sites. If you disable javascript, a lot of function will be also disabled on the site too. So, if the mining site wants to sustain their income, they need to code their core functions (browsing navigation or something similar) also in javascript, in order to force the users not to block javascript... They won't care about the highly qualified technical users because they are less than the Average Joes...

You know the old saying: If you don't pay for it, you are the product. Either in the form of getting your data sold, being subjected to advertising or, as in this case, having your CPU used.



They can't take any legal action because running a miner in your browser is perfectly legal. One may argue it's even less of a legal grey area than the way most advertisers handle your data.

It was a big hype in Ukraine this September.. Some major news  & sport portals (like korrespondent.net, football.ua etc - all owned by (sic!) national-wide "Ukrainian Media Holding", heh) were caught on stealth mining of Monero with CoinHive plugin.It

But The Pirate Bay is openly admitting that they have something like cryptocurrency miner running on their site - and users can choose whether they want to run it or not.
So I have no problem with them - however, I have problems with every single site which is hiding the fact that they are mining coins with hash power generated by the users.