Maybe someone will come later with a idea to make this while preventing abuses (maybe browsers could built it in as a mean of payment?).
Can't it already do that? The demo miner on their website has controls for "CPU Usage Percentage" and "Number of cores used".
As your project did before, you could tie the mining with in game currency. If the underlying block chain is actively traded you could even scale the game currency with real currency in some way... 0.0001 cent is a gold coin for example. Payment that way would seem fairly above board, especially if you clearly tell the player about the taxing system -- this could then be your funding.
Though, in reality, I'd rather not have my battery drained at all; so I'd disable this when not plugged in. Or for desktop only.
Soon (next month or so) the same team are releasing a multi-game coin as well: https://chimaera.io/
Can you expand on this? How are they using it maliciously in your game?
Also, did you get a sense for whether it's a viable alternative to ads?
I don't understand how this made you lose interest in your game. These malicious uses have nothing to do with you or your game...
It was a proof-of-concept and when I saw that it worked I started building a proper version of it. However, soon thereafter rogue actors started using Coinhive for malicious things and I'm now at a point where I don't feel like continuing on the game. I still think it's a cool concept and my game is very clearly opt-in where I explain what will happen when you press "Start mining".
It feels like "this is why we can't have nice things" is applicable here.