Absolutely not. Wasting battery power to let somebody else buy into a pyramid scheme is not my idea of a solution.

It's a perfectly reasonable solution for those who are okay with it. You need to pay with something - either with your privacy, your attention, your money, or your electricity/idle CPU cycles.

Ad blockers eliminate paying with attention, and put a big squeeze on paying with privacy. Which makes the leftover choices of money or power quite reasonable.

What site uses the money or power for is nobody's business. Would you not pay journalists if you found out they like losing money on pyramid schemes?

It's not though because the effects on the rest of the web are negative.

Cryptojacking will become more common the more legit websites use it as a source of revenue. And this specific company / team of developers have been doing very little to stop the malicious use of their javascript. Why support them?

EDIT: By "why support them" I obviously mean, why should a publisher support a team with such wanton disregard for security of the net that they depend on to publish their stuff. I won't read the articles. But their decision to use such a thing isn't a good one and I can criticize it.

Because adblockers can (and do) block all scripts and sites that mine without consent. Specific legal and consent-only domains will need to be whitelisted, which is what CoinHive is trying to with authedmine.com

So people who don't run adblockers should just suck it up and get gut-punched because CoinHive doesn't want to lose money? CoinHive has the ability to just not pay out any versions of the software which aren't authmine. Again, what a bad look to partner with such a crap team of people. There are surely other providers of the exact same service.

> Why support them?

If you object, then by all means, don't support them.

The appropriate way to do that is to not read the article. There's no mining if you don't visit.

You're reading an article that they provide... you're paying for a service. Ads promote tracking, third parties, uncontrolled CPU usage.

A coin being mined is controlled, handled entirely by first party, provides no incentive for tracking, etc.

This seems like a huge win.

I beg to differ. I've tried Coinhive's miner, it used all of processor's threads and making my browser unresponsive, couldn't even move mouse pointer or close the browser. Mining coins on a browser is bad for everybody involved, especially for the users.

https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/02/13/salon-mines-...

>A coin being mined is controlled, handled entirely by first party, provides no incentive for tracking, etc.

Yeah, also a haven for hackers and malicious actors...

EDIT: I guess you weren't aware. CoinHive doesn't track the users who sign up for the service. It doesn't collect any information except email address. So malicious actors can easily sign up for the service and deliver the javascript through an XSS vulnerability for example. I thought that's what you meant by "no incentive for tracking".

In what way? I consider this a security win. Instead of a third party delivering unknown, unscreened content (ads), I get a mining script directly from the site that I'm visiting.

That’s all true.

One man’s trash is another mans treasure. In this case it’s not even trash (power). If it has value to someone else why dismiss it as a barter tool for you?

pyramid scheme? Are you sure what we are talking about?

Using that battery power does not 'let' anyone buy into the pyramid scheme. People buying monero or not is orthogonal to Salon mining it in your browser. Salon mining it does not in any way facilitate people buying it.

Monero itself is worthless for Salon until they exchange it to USD, either directly or through a chain of other cryptocurrencies. Either way, for them to get the USD, some schmuck somewhere needs to buy the coin.

That doesn't mean they're doing anything to cause that person to buy it. That person was going to buy that coin without Salon's help.

Like any coin, if the others dont see value on it, it's worthless.

But last I checked people do value it. So what are you talking about?

Seems wasteful & fruitless.

Better to evolve a micropayments model that works (because at least i can quantify what I pay)

> because at least i can quantify what I pay

And the publishers can quantify how much it gets.

With the volatility of crypto assets this is not a viable solution for the publisher, especially because readers who have an ad-blocker installed are likely to block the mining script as well.

This is a publicity stunt. Nothing more, nothing less.

If so, this is a stupid publicity stunt, given the largely negative reaction by this community and the media. If anything, more people will install adblockers because of things like this.

I'm sure as soon as that micro-payments model evolves Salon will be happy to switch to it. People have been saying that for 20 years, though, and this is the closest we've come.

In principle, yes, PLEASE!!!

In practice, people have been wishing for a well-functioning micropayment system for well over twenty years and the best we have to show for it is PayPal. Flattr seemed like a good idea, mostly, but for some reason it tanked, too (AFAIK).

Either people are not interested in creating one that works, or the problem is really, really hard.

I think the problem is simply hard. Micro-payments imply more infrastructure costs (more transactions) but lower revenue (because the payment itself is tiny, so the fee has to be tiny as well).

But look at Bitcoin's Lightning Network, it may very well become a valid micro-payment system. As far as I know it's biggest scaling roadblock is getting efficient routing.

> Better to evolve a micropayments model that works

I agree but until that exists this is the best thing we have. It's the only way you can pay cents without doing anything else than click a button.

Micropayment is the way to go. There needs to be a two-sided market. Free isn't the market clearing price and whatever the content producer wants to charge also isn't.

    Better to evolve a micropayments model that works

Only problem with that is that the web is decades old now and so far nobody managed to do that.

In theory yes, but in practice this software is a well-known malware. Not a good idea for any respctable site to be using it.

That's really disingenuous. The software does exactly what it says on the cover and the documentation, no more and no less. And it causes no harm of any sort, but uses lots of power as designed. The malware classification comes because some sites used it without user's permission, which CoinHive fixed via the authedmine.com domain - that only allows the miner to be use with explicit and temporary user consent.

But the software is clearly a hot avenue for hackers. And trying to legitimize this kind of thing also makes the foray into "cryptojacking" more enticing.

If legit sites start doing this, users will get used to it and hackers will bring in more cash.

CoinHive didn't fix this, as far as I understand. They simply published an alternative miner. As recently as a week ago, many UK and US gov sites were cryptojacked using the CoinHive software: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bj5m4v/cryptocurr...

They don't even seem to be trying to root out malicious users:

>The team don’t specifically track domains, so if a user’s email address is not, for example, “[email protected],” Coinhive often don’t know where or how the service is being used, though.

CoinHive has assumed that all instances of sites directly using the CoinHive software have been or are going to be blocked, and so have deprecated direct use of the CoinHive JS. Authedmine.com is now the official way to do things, and it operates only with consent.

Why make that assumption and leave users without blockers out to dry?

Why not just halt all payouts to the old software and only pay out to versions which are using the Authedmine.com version?

Why not do KYC on people who have a very high likelihood of using your software to violate the law?

Salon is the kind of magazine which will call (justly) for corporate responsibility in all sorts of industries, but when it comes to software makers just totally not doing the basic, easy things when it comes to respecting web security, they'll pay them.

But isn't it a dangerous road where we hold the makers of software responsible for nefarious uses? Paypal does a lot of this kind of fraud detection and prevention, and we all lambast them for it.

Halting payouts to those using the old software leaves legitimate users out to dry as well - whatever they do, someone is going to be miffed. I assume there will be a point in the future when they do refuse service to all the old API endpoints, but they can't rush that.

I've said this elsewhere - this is a terrible thing, it's an environmental catastrophe.