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A comment on CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web browsers. Parent comment

Re:CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web... by csomar on Tuesday September 26, 2017 @04:27AM (#15337072)
The problem is that mining through the browser is very inefficient. I don't have numbers but it'd probably cost an order of magnitude more, at least, to mine on the browser. And I'm talking about CPU cryptos, forget about bitcoin.
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Re:CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web... by pr0gramm on Tuesday September 26, 2017 @04:37AM (#15337117)
That may be true for Ethereum or Bitcoin, but not for Monero.

The Coinhive Monero miner is about 65% as fast as a native miner would be, at least in Browsers that support WASM.

Disclaimer: I wrote the Coinhive Monero miner.

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Re:CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web... by joosters on Tuesday September 26, 2017 @07:08AM (#15337643)
How does it feel to see your code getting used worldwide... almost entirely by deceitful scum?
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Re:CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web... by bfuller on Tuesday September 26, 2017 @09:18AM (#15338349)
You get a lot of hate. But I think what you did was really cool!
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Re:CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web... by csomar on Tuesday September 26, 2017 @08:24AM (#15337970)
Thank you very much for this information. Supports for WASM looks decent. Looking into it now!
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Re:CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web... by colejohnson66 on Tuesday September 26, 2017 @09:17AM (#15338334)
Only 65%? That’s an opportunity for a 50% speedup by writing in native code. And running on the GPU would be even faster, no? What’s the protection against that?
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Re:CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web... by rdlecler1 on Tuesday September 26, 2017 @05:41AM (#15337333)
If this became mainstream I’m sure we would find more efficient solutions.
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Re:CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web... by qbrass on Tuesday September 26, 2017 @12:15PM (#15340000)
Someone will just package a mining ASIC with an API that lets advertisers use it directly and market it as a way to speed up web browsing.

Maybe Intel will throw it on their chips as a processor extension.

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