Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Starbucks in-store wifi provider in Buenos Aires uses CoinHive

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 67 posts

Re: Starbucks in-store wifi provider in Buenos Aires uses CoinHive

#31

Post by whiskyant »

flibble wrote: post #2

Does anyone have an idea of the ROI on this? I'm thinking you'd need a massive number of 10 second to mine any meaningful number of BTC on consumer laptops.

Coinhive estimates that a user with a mid-range laptop would have a hashrate of 30 h/s.

10 minutes of mining = 30 * 10 * 60 = 18,000 hashes

Since Coinhive pays out 0.000090 XMR per million hashes (current rate as of Dec 11. 2017), that's $0.0004250394 per user (18000/1000000 * 0.000090 * 262.37).

In order to make $1, you would need 2,353 visitors with laptops mining for 10 minutes each.

Re: Starbucks in-store wifi provider in Buenos Aires uses CoinHive

#32

Post by elif »

criddell wrote: post #8
flibble wrote: post #2

Does anyone have an idea of the ROI on this? I'm thinking you'd need a massive number of 10 second to mine any meaningful number of BTC on consumer laptops.

I've wondered what the ROI would be for me to leave my home office computer mining bitcoin while I'm at work. I know the likelihood of me mining something is tiny, but so is the expected payout when I buy a lotto ticket. I spent about $20 / year on lotto tickets (basically whenever Powerball gets near a record jackpot). That same amount of money will keep my i5 ThinkPad running for a long time. Am I more likely to mi…

not very good odds on your thinkpad..

but if you set up a handful (3-5) of high end ASIC miners and mine BCH (10x more difficulty/hashrate on BTC right now) without a pool for a year, there is a realistic chance you'll get lucky and mine a block (worth about $17k).

The numbers are changing all the time, but when I last did that calculation I was surprised.

Re: Starbucks in-store wifi provider in Buenos Aires uses CoinHive

#33

Post by zeusk »

rileyphone wrote: post #26
zenon wrote: post #5

The Coinhive script mines Monero: https://coinhive.com/ . It's been a while since JavaScript Bitcoin mining was feasible :)

I really like the idea of this as a captcha alternative, especially with the "train our neural nets" approach google has been taking recently with them.

How would coinhive work as a captcha alternative? There is no human involvement in mining, is there?

Re: Starbucks in-store wifi provider in Buenos Aires uses CoinHive

#34

Post by thisisit »

This script is mining monero which uses Cryptonight algorithm. This algorithm kinda famous for being CPU mine-able unlike other cryptocurrencies.

Now, the coinhive page is completely blocked by all the plugins so I cannot find the exact story. But, if memory serves correctly, during the launch devs have presented a story where they use the script on a forum. The results were pretty impressive with payout reaching ~ 1k USD.

Though there is a section which clearly says this is not economical, my take on this was that they wanted to entice enough people to mine using their script.

The devs also promised to look into this kind of abuse but I guess that is not happening.

Re: Starbucks in-store wifi provider in Buenos Aires uses CoinHive

#35

Post by apandhi »

I had a run-in with CoinHive this weekend so I did a bit of research.

Most modern computers can do about 30/h a second. Coinhive currently pays out 0.00009030 XMR ($0.02 USD) per 1M hashes.

For a 10 second pause, they'd mine 300 hashes (about $0.000006 USD). To make $1 USD, they'd need to have ~166,666.66 people connect to their in store WIFI.

Re: Starbucks in-store wifi provider in Buenos Aires uses CoinHive

#36

Post by diggan »

zeusk wrote: post #33
rileyphone wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like the idea of this as a captcha alternative, especially with the "train our neural nets" approach google has been taking recently with them.

How would coinhive work as a captcha alternative? There is no human involvement in mining, is there?

Not saying it would be a good idea but something like "Please wait until your CPU have done enough amount of work before submitting this comment"

Re: Starbucks in-store wifi provider in Buenos Aires uses CoinHive

#37

Post by diego »

apandhi wrote: post #35

I had a run-in with CoinHive this weekend so I did a bit of research. Most modern computers can do about 30/h a second. Coinhive currently pays out 0.00009030 XMR ($0.02 USD) per 1M hashes. For a 10 second pause, they'd mine 300 hashes (about $0.000006 USD). To make $1 USD, they'd need to have ~166,666.66 people connect to their in store WIFI.

That's plausible given that Fibertel is the #1 provider of free wifi in Argentina. It could well be that some IT guy had the idea, figured it was possible to make a few hundred bucks a month this way, under the radar. Completely not worth it for the company.

Re: Starbucks in-store wifi provider in Buenos Aires uses CoinHive

#38

Post by discreditable »

zeusk wrote: post #33
rileyphone wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like the idea of this as a captcha alternative, especially with the "train our neural nets" approach google has been taking recently with them.

How would coinhive work as a captcha alternative? There is no human involvement in mining, is there?

It works as a rate-limiter in a way. If you're interested look into HashCash as proposed to combat email spam: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

Re: Starbucks in-store wifi provider in Buenos Aires uses CoinHive

#39

Post by misterdata »

diggan wrote: post #36
zeusk wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would coinhive work as a captcha alternative? There is no human involvement in mining, is there?

Not saying it would be a good idea but something like "Please wait until your CPU have done enough amount of work before submitting this comment"

This exists: https://github.com/pixelspark/webpow

Re: Starbucks in-store wifi provider in Buenos Aires uses CoinHive

#40

Post by astura »

Jemmeh wrote: post #14
criddell wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've wondered what the ROI would be for me to leave my home office computer mining bitcoin while I'm at work. I know the likelihood of me mining something is tiny, but so is the expected payout when I buy a lotto ticket. I spent about $20 / year on lotto tickets (basically whenever Powerball gets near a record jackpot). That same amount of money will keep my i5 ThinkPad running for a long time. Am I more likely to mi…

I am by no means an expert, but my understanding is that a personal computer isn't energy/heat efficient enough to make a profit from mining. It costs more in energy than you would make from the bitcoin. My friends who do some mining have told me the same. You're competing with computers that are made exclusively for bitcoin and people who are heavily investing their time into it so it makes sense. It would probably…

Jeez, you're completely missing the point.

The GP was asking for a comparison the odds/cost of mining a coin with the odds/cost of winning the lottery. Not about "investing," and not about "making a profit."

Basically, which form of gambling is better from a cost/rewards perspective.

Post reply on HN