In the early part of September 2017, a new website at coin-hive.com (has been changed to coinhive.com) unleashed an extremely useful and anticipated development in the crypto currency realm. Their website features a Javascript based mining pool for Monero. They offer a browser UI in addition to their API. By September 14, they were already receiving heavy loads on their servers from website owners. As of now, they report a combined mining power of up to 13.5 million hashes per second. They also report that to be 5% of what is globally mined within Monero's blockchain.
Monero is already a popular option for anonymous transactions and currently has a value of $94. It reached $100 threshold for the first time earlier this week. For now, it is quite possible to somewhat effectively mine coins like Monero with CPU only configurations. On their website, Coinhive suggests that website publishers can expect about 1.341 XMR (Monero) per million hits, assuming they all produced 30 hashes each at least. There have been and are similar projects. A few Bitcoin Javascript miners came and went a few years ago. A new crypto currency called JSEcoin has been partially released with Javascript based mining. A "browser-based Blockchain and Ecosystem" called Nimiq is also under development.
While a few developers have long known the potential power of Javascript mining, most people who heard of it called the idea worthless or crazy in some way. Coinhive is the most effectively implemented and widely used instance of Javascript for crypto currency mining. In addition to their background mining code, their API offers proof of work captchas and short links. This means that viewers must allow their computer to mine a specified amount of hashes instead of solving a visual puzzle to obtain the desired locked content. In addition to providing publishers with a new potential revenue stream, it serves as a top quality form of security from bots due to being resource intensive.
In even bigger news, Coinhive's Javascript miner has been spotted on mainstream services. CBS Showtime was caught with the script being served to their premium subscribers. They don't claim to know why the script was on their site or who was responible. Meanwhile, The Pirate Bay was also caught with the script, but took responsibility by saying that they were experimenting with ways to supplement or replace advertising on their website. Mainstream media and some users have demonized them for not warning people before adding the script. Despite the bad press, many people have spoken out in support of them due to the fact that many people depend on them for free content. FaucetHUB, the popular crypto currency micro payment processor for faucets has also implemented the script for their users to mine with their own UI and the added bonus of shared revenue being automatically exchanged to bitcoin. They are producing over 17000 hashes per second currently from over 1000 active mining sessions. A browser extension called SafeBrowse for Google Chrome has even been discovered to have the script. This is the first known plugin for browsers to use Coinhive.
