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?