Technology

Coinhive vs JSEcoin | Browser based cryptocurrency mining

Coinhive made recent news when sites like Pirate Bay had deployed their scripts and were mining cryptocurrency in visitors’ browsers without their consent or knowledge. While this wasn’t the best way to deploy a browser based mining script, it did garner much attention for coinhive and browser based mining.  It also made ad blockers pay attention to coinhive and they started blocking the service (more on that below).

When I learned about browser based mining of cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, and others, I was in instantly interested in the potential of this for website owners. Especially with the recent surge in price of Bitcoin.

I quickly created an account with coinhive and deployed it on one of my sites to start learning about browser based mining first-hand.  This also lead my to a Google search for other browser based mining tools which lead me to JSEcoin.

My first thought that this would be a good way to raise money for the fires that devastated Northern California in 2017 so I created this page on my site – http://slybaldguys.com/fires

If you visited that page you can see that there are two ways that you can mine currency in the browser. One is a captcha like button and the other is to click play on a javascript based miner.  To make nice with the ad blockers, coinhive now requires a user to initiate the mining in order for the mining to start. You may have also noticed that JSEcoin displays a popup bar on the bottom of the page notifying visitors that mining is taking place in the browser and provides the visitor that they can opt-out.  This is one of the main differences between JSEcoin and coinhive.

This brings us to the pros and cons of JSEcoin and coinhive:

Pros:

JSEcoin:

  • Easy to deploy – just cut and paste some javascript
  • Runs without the visitor having to initiate it
  • Notifies the visitor
  • Is very lightweight in the browser – less than a video ad
  • Has less of a difficulty to mine = more coins (as of this post)
  • Ability to self mine

coinhive:

  • Easy to deploy – just cut and paste some javascript
  • Multiple types of deployment – captcha, miner, API, & shortlinks
  • Ability to self mine
  • Notifies the visitor
  • Mines Monero which has an established value

Cons:

JSEcoin:

  • Limited ways to deploy the mining
  • Currency is pre-ICO and doesn’t have a value yet (as of this post)
  • JSEcoin is an unknown currency at this point

coinhive:

  • Visitor must initiate the mining
  • It takes millions of visitors to generate one coin
  • Is very heavy on the CPU usage (though, this can be throttled)
  • Has a bad history with the press and ad blockers

One thing that I didn’t mention above about JSEcoin is that JSEcoins are distributed on a raffle basis based on how many “tickets” you have generated in the last 30 seconds. This can be a good and bad thing depending on the size of your site.  The distribution of tickets is largely based on the number of unique visitors your site has and how long they stay.  I’m currently generating about 1 JSEcoin per 1200 unique visitors.

In summary, if you’re looking to mine cryptocurrency from your website visitors I recommend JSEcoin at the moment. Unless you have a ton of posting traffic where you can use a captch like coinhive’s. Or in that case, you could deploy both.