Spamming the adblockers to whitelist them (and their authedmine alternative) definitely didn't help https://github.com/easylist/easylist/issues/712
Ask HN: Why did Coinhive, the in-browser crypto miner, fail?
31–40 of 52 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why did Coinhive, the in-browser crypto miner, fail?
#32The real reason they failed (mining efficiency aside) is because the technology was co-opted by criminals that embedded the miner into hacked sites and display advertisements without permission. This caused them to land on every single anti-virus and domain blacklist out there.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Coinhive, the in-browser crypto miner, fail?
#33This is a big question for me too! Especially since they didn't seem to have any major reason to burn a lot of cash or to run out of money! Was it maybe a lawsuit, fraud or regulatory issue? I would LOVE to know.
their own statement:
The drop in hash rate (over 50%) after the last Monero hard fork hit us hard. So did the “crash“ of the crypto currency market with the value of XMR depreciating over 85% within a year. This and the announced hard fork and algorithm update of the Monero network on March 9 has lead us to the conclusion that we need to discontinue Coinhive.
https://coinhive.com/blog/en/discontinuation-of-coinhive (you probably need to whitelist that in your adblocker to read it)
Sounds like "lots of work to do soon and not making all that much money, not worth it". (surely being known as "malware" didn't help either...)
Re: Ask HN: Why did Coinhive, the in-browser crypto miner, fail?
#34A 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.
So why didn't they use GPU? Could you build something like that for WebGL?
No compute shader support in WebGL. Have to wait for WebGPU for that.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Coinhive, the in-browser crypto miner, fail?
#35Well, 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.
These are definitely important issues but they don't sound like show-stoppers. Many people use anti virus software and adblockers but then again many don't! Additionally they (or some alternative) may have been able to improve the software and create a simple consent process to avoid being blacklisted.
Even at the start their rates were fairly bad, price crashes + being blocked must have made it a lot worse. And few legit sites are going to use something that gets them branded as hosting malware, even if only some of their users use software detecting it.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Coinhive, the in-browser crypto miner, fail?
#36Spamming the adblockers to whitelist them (and their authedmine alternative) definitely didn't help https://github.com/easylist/easylist/issues/712
While I agree that they didn't handle it well, I'm mixed on this. While I think putting a miner on a site covertly is unethical, I also think blocking something that's not an ad in an ad-blocker is equally unethical.
I think a miner like this could provide an interesting way for people to monetize their content, as long as it's opt-in, but blocking a non-ad like this just totally deflates the argument that ad-blockers are about privacy or intrusiveness, and their really about people having their cake and eating it too.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Coinhive, the in-browser crypto miner, fail?
#37I'm not sure how it's a perfect alternative. It seems worse on almost every dimension.
You're stuck between running this miner covertly (scummy) or asking for permission (who is going to click yes?).
How much of Coinhive's income comes from users who are unknowingly running the code? It seems like a move towards more user-hostility, not less.
The one time I saw an actual fit for the end user was an online game that would let you turn on the miner to win in-game coins. Who else can pull off an opt-in?
Re: Ask HN: Why did Coinhive, the in-browser crypto miner, fail?
#38I think in most cases “failed” just means the founders think there are other (clearer) opportunities to pursue. Doesn’t necessarily mean what they were working on didn’t make sense.
IMHO there still is quite an opportunity to find substitutes for ads that provide revenue for websites and aren’t as annoying as ads whether it is mining or something like SETI or something like re-captcha.
Would love to see more in this direction.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Coinhive, the in-browser crypto miner, fail?
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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₹.
There is no such thing as ASIC-proof. You can make an ASIC for any deterministic algorithm. "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 havi…
There is no such thing as ASIC-proof. You can make an ASIC for any deterministic algorithm.
True. Although you could probably design an algorithm which requires so many of the capabilities of a CPU, like a fast 64-bit FPU and a lot of cache, that the transistor count of an ASIC would approach that of a general-purpose CPU produced in much greater volume. This would make special-purpose hardware not cost effective.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Coinhive, the in-browser crypto miner, fail?
#40I was still working in the security field (MSSP SOC) when Coinhive came out. It quickly because one of the prominent "threats" we had to deal with. All of our clients wanted any site that had Coinhive on it, whether or not the site owners added it or criminals did, blocked. It was view by nearly everyone in cyber security, including AV companies, as malware. It got a bad reputation because many sites didn't allow you to opt-in, and many didn't even tell you they were running it.