Tony Schiavone wrote: ↑Mon Mar 05, 2018 4:00 pm
Is it seriously that easy to mine for bitcoin? How does it work to put a miner on a webpage? Is it just a chance at it once someone clicks to load the page? Do they really think they can bring in
that volume of site traffic anymore?
Given what I know about it, its scarcity increases over time. If they had done it years ago, then maybe.
But now--with fewer clicks and the more remote chance to get fewer bitcoins--it isn't just something that reeks of desperation. It's downright laughable. It's like seeing something added to grandpa's webpage because he heard it was cool.
Mining bitcoins is, at its core, calculating a bunch of hashes of the state of the blockchain, so yeah, it's that easy. Miners created those Javascript snippets that can inconspicously inserted in web pages to use your "idle" computing power to do those hashes.
What James (or, more likely, Mike Mattei) is doing is the scummiest form of mining: inserting a miner script on their page and not asking for the user's permission to do so. That's why NoScript is more and more necessary these days, to block shitheads like James/Mike pulling shit like this.
I have no problem with the model that Null tried on KF after getting busted as a malware provider for inserting one of these sneaky miners: ask the user permission, and let the user decide the throttle of the mining activity. But hey, it's easy to buttfuck your visitor's CPU for profit. I wonder if James/Mike didn't even bothered to filter out mobile browser off running this mining script - not online it drains battery and make the devide slow as shit, it doesn't even generate enough hashes per second to justify it.