Ask HN: Why did Coinhive, the in-browser crypto miner, fail?

It's really hard for me to understand why it failed as they seemed to be the PERFECT alternative to running ads. The official statement doesn't really cut it for me, what are your thoughts on this?

This is a particularly bad experience for mobile users with battery and CPU cooling limitations to computing.

While the growth of mobile probably wasn't a primary reason, I suspect the founders may have seen that the future didn't look great, even if they could solve the monetization of exploits and collapse of crypto prices overall headwinds. With crypto pricing falling to near the power input costs when mined on ASICs and GPUs, CPU mining from Javascript was going to be a case where users paid $1 for ~$0.10 of crypto which only a tiny sliver of the original input ($1) went to the content creator.

Speculating here, but a browser JS engine is not the ideal mining vehicle, particularly on mobile. I think you would have to have enormous volume to actually make any money. A significant amount of that would then go to the site owner (why else would they use it?), leaving very little profit for CoinHive itself.

A million CPUs would not be as efficient mining Bitcoin as a single ASIC. There are no coins where CPU mining is as good as GPU. JavaScript is also inefficient compared to native programs.

Overall, it probably didn't generate very much money. Mining is a commodity. An ad click is worth orders of magnitude more.