21–30 of 52 posts
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.
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Hope this helps illustrate the point: That $250,000 every month amount was made at the cost of way more than $250,000 worth of electricity.
But it wasn't coinhive or coinhive's users who were paying for it. Website visitors carried the cost...
Well, for one, AV software started to classify any website with its code as 'infected' with malware. Then adblockers blocked their script, and even today their website doesn't load properly with uBlock activated.
Additionally they (or some alternative) may have been able to improve the software and create a simple consent process to avoid being blacklisted.
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I thought Monero was designed to be resistant to ASICs? Please correct me if I'm wrong, I don't have that much knowledge about crypto₹.
That's one of the goals yes. However efficient ASICs were able to be constructed for the current (and previous) algorithms. Monero will make a hardfork, right now actually, to brick the existing ASICs. The new algorithm isn't sufficiently different to prevent them however and we will probably see efficient ASICs in under 6 months. The long term hope instead lies on a new algorithm[0] which tries to change the POW alg…
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.
The idea was absurd from the outset. A few minutes of mobile CPU mining in a browser is a nearly worthless pittance.
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They were mining Monero, not Bitcoin.
CPU mining XMR is similarly not efficient compared to GPU
Now, obviously a rig full of Vega cards put out a lot higher hash rate than an 8C CPU, but the CPU was actually reasonably efficient in terms of wattage. At the time, building quad-CPU rigs on older architectures was actually a reasonably efficient build.
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As Monero currently has ASICs running on the network no they're not. But without them yes they are profitable especially if you're not paying for electricity as in this case.
I thought Monero was designed to be resistant to ASICs? Please correct me if I'm wrong, I don't have that much knowledge about crypto₹.
"ASIC-resistance", in this context, only means that ASICs can be held to a low multiple of CPU/GPU efficiency. So ASICs can be 10x as efficient as a CPU/GPU, but not 10k-1m times as efficient like they can on something like SHA.
Unfortunately, profit trends towards zero (towards cost of production) until prices change, so having a 10x advantage is still actually quite big. That means you're making at least a small profit when everyone else is forced to turn off their rigs.
In practice this means that ASIC-resistance, as a method of decentralizing control of the network, doesn't work. Big farms pay cheaper rates for electricity (in China, sometimes zero, by stealing it or bribing local officials), and have insider access to much more efficient ASIC hardware than the general public does. So when profit declines to zero, they inherit the network by virtue of being the only miners who remain profitable.
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We were all paying for it...
But the cost to remove ads here is very worth spending that electricity over my attention.
I run an ad blocker most of the time because crappy ads and ad-tech uses a lot of bandwidth and battery. Crypto-mining is even worse for power consumption.