Recently torrent portal The Pirate Bay was caught running a cryptocurrency miner on its website, quietly hijacking visitors’ computing resources to stack Monero coins. The miner in question was provided by Coinhive running a javascript based service which lets site owners the option to mine or to convert the CPU power of visitors into Monero coins.
Clarifying the operators released an official statement stating that they were testing a possible mechanism where the users get a ad-free environment in return of letting the website use their CPU resources to mine a cryptocurrency. Sounds fair ! Though since the users were not aware of any such mechanism, it was unethical on part of TPB to have this system put load on our computers without our knowledge.
But as is the case with every technology, it too has its share of hell yes’ and no ways’. With a volley of supporters and critics, its still possible to look at it as something that can possibly be groundbreaking for web user experience.
No one likes ads, and to be honest with everyone downloading freely someone has to pay for the upkeep of website and if few percent of CPU power is all that’s needed for few minutes then its not a bad deal. And if you don’t want to do that you can disable the miner with a plugin like NoScript or ScriptBlock or by adding Coinhive to an ad blocker’s blacklist. You may also choose to disable javascript, though it will greatly affect your web experience.
But it leads to possibility of malware which siphons unsuspecting users’ CPUs for spare cycles to mine cryptocurrency, as quoted in this incident by the Quartz. It can also put significant load on your CPU and slow it down. Its a controversial practice, and at worst it can also drain your batteries or send your electricity bills soaring.
My conclusion is that with the continuing collapse in online advertising revenues, websites are turning to other methods to pay their bills, and with the general trend of increasing CPU power many users can actually spare some power for a better online experience. But the bottom line is, unlike typical advertising which is overt, mining is covert. This clandestine approach to “using visitors” with possible invisibility will undoubtedly raise new questions around legality and should be regulated and made use of before it turns astray and becomes a tech of the darker side of internet.
