Embedable Javascript Bitcoin miner for your website

[Steve]

I compared this with the native Bitcoin c++ client's mining...I am getting 4 to 5x the performance with your Javascript miner (running on OSX in the Chrome browser).  Can anyone else confirm that (I'm getting about 9Mhash/s in the browser vs less than 2Mhash/s with the bitcoin client)?  If it's really the case, that's quite impressive!

Sorry to disappoint, Steve, but our site is just listing hashes per second, so you're probably seeing 9 khps, not 9Mhps 

Unfortunately, javascript computation is rather slow There is intense discussion of making use of web-based CL to use the graphics card, but no implementation yet.

Oops.  So, I worked out some estimates for a website that gets 10,000 hits/day and where people stay on the page an average of 5 min.  If I did the numbers correctly, that would be on the order of 0.001 BTC/day (or $0.0065 at current exchange rates).  This doesn't seem like very much...how would advertising usually compare with this?

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[SgtSpike]

I compared this with the native Bitcoin c++ client's mining...I am getting 4 to 5x the performance with your Javascript miner (running on OSX in the Chrome browser).  Can anyone else confirm that (I'm getting about 9Mhash/s in the browser vs less than 2Mhash/s with the bitcoin client)?  If it's really the case, that's quite impressive!

Sorry to disappoint, Steve, but our site is just listing hashes per second, so you're probably seeing 9 khps, not 9Mhps 

Unfortunately, javascript computation is rather slow There is intense discussion of making use of web-based CL to use the graphics card, but no implementation yet.

Oops.  So, I worked out some estimates for a website that gets 10,000 hits/day and where people stay on the page an average of 5 min.  If I did the numbers correctly, that would be on the order of 0.001 BTC/day (or $0.0065 at current exchange rates).  This doesn't seem like very much...how would advertising usually compare with this?

10k views per day would probably net around $1.00 in ad revenue per day.  Maybe more if they're mostly unique.

[AbbydonKrafts]

However, I do not currently have a reason to believe that Google would flag this as malware. Because, as best as I know, this does not meet the definition of Malware.... if so, wouldn't Google have flagged Bitcoin.org as a distributor of malware, for having miner downloads on it's homepage?

I ask to provoke questions, and discussion. I've been thinking about this all morning, and as best as I can rationalize, this is not different and an ad server. Even Flash ads can, and do, consume your CPU like their is no tomorrow.

There's a difference between these:

• Bitcoin.org Downloads - These are willing participants. Downloading your own client makes perfect sense. It's like participating with BOINC.
• Flash Ads - Those things are definitely a bane to all of us, especially the ones that have sound that is always 150% of other embeds. But, they are visible to the visitor, so they know they are there. They can also be disabled by the user. There's also the point of it may be "relevant" to the visitor.
• Embedded Miner - This can be deemed non-beneficial to the visitor and only a nuisance. It doesn't provide any extra content to them, but it does use up their CPU. Imagine if many sites implemented it, and a visitor had many tabs open with it running. The visitor wouldn't be gaining anything, but instead wonder they their computer is screaming at them.

I'm definitely interested in the concept, but it would need some extra work to be a little less intrusive. I'm watching the discussion to see how it goes. 

[Dusty]

Awesome idea, and with the upcoming webcl, even better!

[lowentropy]

It's down.

Eep    Thanks for the notice, it's back up now.

[gigitrix]

Deleted my post then, that wasn't really a "downtime", more of a "blip"

[Turix]

Fun statistics time - my Google Nexus S runs at a rate of 43Mhash/day if I just leave it sitting on my websites home page 

[slush]

Fun statistics time - my Google Nexus S runs at a rate of 43Mhash/day if I just leave it sitting on my websites home page  

Really Mhash?

Edit: Oh, per _day_, I see

[gigitrix]

per day

[TiagoTiago]

Awesome, gonna check it out

[Steve]

I think the future of this is to develop a miner that is easy for a person to install and that websites could interface with...a user would have a choice between ads, mining or direct payment for access or content.  A given website would stipulate a number of hash computations required for access and the miner would use spare cycles and run overnight to try and satisfy the requirement of all websites the user subscribes to...if the user tries to sign up for more sites than his hardware could possibly handle, it would alert him to that fact.  People with efficient GPUs would have a lot more of this currency to spend on website access.  But people with less efficient hardware might still use this method to access websites as it might be preferable to a separate billing or ads even if the electricity cost exceeds the value of the bitcoins they mine.

[1bitc0inplz]

Thanks everyone for all the great feedback.

We appreciate all the constructive conversation, as that is really helping us find the direction of this site. We understand that it isn't perfect, that is the reason we are not worrying about fees at first.

We are proud to announce that we are rolling out our registration emails. This should be arriving in your inbox starting now, and over the course of the next several hours. We had a lot of sign-ups, so we are having to span the emails out. Please be patient as we get all this mail delivered.

Once you get your registration email, you should have instructions for how to activate your account. Once activated you will be able to set your wallet id.

Actually, that is about all the current control panel does. We understand that you all will want to see stats about the performance of your site. We do too, and we are working on that. Additions will be coming quickly, but we wanted to get you guys something sooner.

We really do appreciate everyone helping us take part in this "beta", keep up the feedback... we are nowhere near done with this site yet 

[aahzmundus]

simply amazing, thank you for this!

[brombomb]

I'm really liking this idea of a JS miner.  I was wondering how do you find your stats?  I tried implementing this on my site and "borrowed" you js miner code to display the hashes, but it seems like it's always 0.  I can send you a link to the site or my id if it help debug anything.

Using Chrome 11 on Windows 7

[lowentropy]

I'm really liking this idea of a JS miner.  I was wondering how do you find your stats?  I tried implementing this on my site and "borrowed" you js miner code to display the hashes, but it seems like it's always 0.  I can send you a link to the site or my id if it help debug anything.

Using Chrome 11 on Windows 7

We plan to open-source the client-side code soon (so basically just un-minify it  ), which should make it a lot easier to experiment with.

[1bitc0inplz]

I'm really liking this idea of a JS miner.  I was wondering how do you find your stats?  I tried implementing this on my site and "borrowed" you js miner code to display the hashes, but it seems like it's always 0.  I can send you a link to the site or my id if it help debug anything.

Using Chrome 11 on Windows 7

The js code on bitp.it is slightly different than what you should be putting on your site. This mainly due to the fact that we wanted to shows stats on the home page, and needed direct access to the jsMiner engine... the code we distribute for your website actually generates an iframe and runs the miner through that, due to cross domain permissions in web browsers, it was the only way to get the WebWorkers to work... apparently, despite HTML 5 specing CORS (which we use), the HTML 5 spec for WebWorkers specifically says that no cross domain permissions are allowed for web worker sources 

Because you are attempting to run the code without the iframe, on a domain other than bitp.it, your browser is denying your page permissions to new up a Worker() with a bitp.it source domain. For a little experiment, though, you could try using the forceUIThread: true param when newing up jsMiner... that will force the miner to use a non-web worker version of it's routines, and thusly work around the above mentioned shortcoming of web workers... however, it will lower your hash rate... so it was more of a experiment than something we necessarily recommend.

Now that we've got a control panel out there, at least in a rough draft, we are going to work on improving it. We'd love to show you your hash rate there. Also, we plan on exposing jsMiner stats through the iframe back to the calling page. Both of these should correctly take care things.

Just out of curiosity, and also so I can better understand how to write the code... what were you planning on doing with the hash rate? at the jsMiner level, that is a per web browser state, just FYI.

[1bitc0inplz]

I'm really liking this idea of a JS miner.  I was wondering how do you find your stats?  I tried implementing this on my site and "borrowed" you js miner code to display the hashes, but it seems like it's always 0.  I can send you a link to the site or my id if it help debug anything.

Using Chrome 11 on Windows 7

We plan to open-source the client-side code soon (so basically just un-minify it  ), which should make it a lot easier to experiment with.

Yes, that is true too... we are planning on open sourcing the client side bits 

[brombomb]

I'm really liking this idea of a JS miner.  I was wondering how do you find your stats?  I tried implementing this on my site and "borrowed" you js miner code to display the hashes, but it seems like it's always 0.  I can send you a link to the site or my id if it help debug anything.

Using Chrome 11 on Windows 7

Just out of curiosity, and also so I can better understand how to write the code... what were you planning on doing with the hash rate? at the jsMiner level, that is a per web browser state, just FYI.

Thanks for all the info.  I'm a web geek myself.  While I haven't had the chance to play with any HTML5 stuff yet I really like your project.  I emebeded the code in my site and just wanted to see what it running on my site was producing.  Also as someone else mentioned above They calculated their per day stat.  I left my page open all day on my laptop and just wanted to play around with it.

[Reto]

There's a difference between these:

• Bitcoin.org Downloads - These are willing participants. Downloading your own client makes perfect sense. It's like participating with BOINC.
• Flash Ads - Those things are definitely a bane to all of us, especially the ones that have sound that is always 150% of other embeds. But, they are visible to the visitor, so they know they are there. They can also be disabled by the user. There's also the point of it may be "relevant" to the visitor.
• Embedded Miner - This can be deemed non-beneficial to the visitor and only a nuisance. It doesn't provide any extra content to them, but it does use up their CPU. Imagine if many sites implemented it, and a visitor had many tabs open with it running. The visitor wouldn't be gaining anything, but instead wonder they their computer is screaming at them.

I'm definitely interested in the concept, but it would need some extra work to be a little less intrusive. I'm watching the discussion to see how it goes. 

I think a good solution would be to have a "Start Mining" button on sites, so users wouldn't be wondering why they're at 100% CPU.
Currently CPU mining isn't worth it because of the inefficiency.

[lowentropy]

I think a good solution would be to have a "Start Mining" button on sites, so users wouldn't be wondering why they're at 100% CPU.
Currently CPU mining isn't worth it because of the inefficiency.

CPU mining (even if this were compiled code) is definitely inefficient. We're eager to see what advances in HTML5 can bring to the table, namely web-based CL.

Having a "Start Mining" button is a good idea. We've also considered a small embedded real-time chart of browser hashing speed, or something else to let the client know what their browser is up to.