What's Up With This Browser Mining Update?
First off let me start by saying that overall I love Freebitco.in. I think it's the very best faucet out there. No annoying popups, and no difficult captchas. The reward is also comparatively high. Their best feature is probably the annual interest which is at a pretty decent (and realistic) 4.08%. None of that 6000% after 60 days BS we get with the obvious scam sites.
That being said I'm not sure their being totally honest with us here. I gave the mining a try because well, I had nothing to lose I guess and I wanted to see if it was decent. The returns are alright, they're comparable to what you'd get from fauceting so it's equivalent to an autofaucet I guess. But something about is just fishy.
First off, Bitcoin mining is generally not profitable because of electricity cost. If you've got a cheap source of electricity then it becomes profitable, but only a little, especially if you're just mining at home with a small rig. So without considering anything else it's just not going to be profitable for the average user.
Now even more fishy is that they are somehow mining Bitcoin successfully with a CPU and at 6 H/s. That hash rate is laughably low, it shouldn't produce any income at all really. I mean anything below 1TH/s is pretty pathetic. This leads me to believe that they actually aren't mining bitcoins but they're using our CPUs to mine something else maybe and just give us a share of the profits in bitcoin.
Most people who believe this to be true think that they are actually mining Monero with the CPUs. Apparently that's what Thepiratebay has been doing. For this update to happen so soon after that reveal seems odd. But what's their motive for telling us it's bitcoin mining when all the clues point to it being something else?