
Starbucks in-store wifi provider in Buenos Aires uses CoinHive - DyslexicAtheist
https://twitter.com/imnoah/status/936948776119537665
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zenon
The Coinhive script mines Monero:
[https://coinhive.com/](https://coinhive.com/) . It's been a while since
JavaScript Bitcoin mining was feasible :)

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rileyphone
I really like the idea of this as a captcha alternative, especially with the
"train our neural nets" approach google has been taking recently with them.

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zeusk
How would coinhive work as a captcha alternative? There is no human
involvement in mining, is there?

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discreditable
It works as a rate-limiter in a way. If you're interested look into HashCash
as proposed to combat email spam:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash)

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zeusk
rate-limiting is not what captcha does, that's for DDoS protection and even in
that scenario I feel HashCash and crypto mining is a very terrible idea.

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discreditable
Hence "captcha alternative" and not "alternative captcha".

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zeusk
Wouldn't "captcha alternative" imply that the said alternative is a
replacement for captcha and has similar functionality?

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discreditable
Not necessarily. If the goal is to reduce bot activity, captchas and hashcash
are two ways to do that. Captchas are hard for bots to pass, whereas hashcash
wastes a fixed amount of CPU time. The result is that robot operators have to
invest more effort to abuse your service at scale than they're willing to
(hopefully). In this sense, hashcash is a captcha alternative—it's not a
captcha, but it helps with the same problem. An alternative captcha might be
using something other than reCaptcha. At least, that's how I'd interpret it.

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ntietz
One of the big problems I have with this (and with mining, in general) is that
it's attempting to create value by simply _wasting electricity_. Come on, we
should not be spending CPU cycles just for the sake of spending CPU cycles...

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aquilaFiera
Using this logic, dollars are creating value by wasting paper and metal. What
you're ignoring is the value of having a publicly auditable ledger of
transactions and a decentralized currency. That _isn't_ a waste of
electricity.

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of cryptocurrency; this just isn't
a good one.

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apandhi
I had a run-in with CoinHive this weekend so I did a bit of research.

Most modern computers can do about 30/h a second. Coinhive currently pays out
0.00009030 XMR ($0.02 USD) per 1M hashes.

For a 10 second pause, they'd mine 300 hashes (about $0.000006 USD). To make
$1 USD, they'd need to have ~166,666.66 people connect to their in store WIFI.

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em3rgent0rdr
30 hashes a second seems _extremely_ low and I'm wondering where they got that
number. Are they using unoptimized JavaScript I nstead of ASM.js?

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apandhi
30 hashes a second is what you'd likely see on mid-range laptops. You can test
your machine on CoinHive ([https://coinhive.com/](https://coinhive.com/))

My fully maxed out 2017 rMBP can only do 50-60h/s at full speed with all
threads. Most people don't have a machine nearly as powerful as mine.

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flibble
Does anyone have an idea of the ROI on this? I'm thinking you'd need a massive
number of 10 second to mine any meaningful number of BTC on consumer laptops.

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criddell
I've wondered what the ROI would be for me to leave my home office computer
mining bitcoin while I'm at work. I know the likelihood of me mining something
is tiny, but so is the expected payout when I buy a lotto ticket.

I spent about $20 / year on lotto tickets (basically whenever Powerball gets
near a record jackpot). That same amount of money will keep my i5 ThinkPad
running for a long time. Am I more likely to mine some Bitcoin or win the
lottery?

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soared
I don't think anyone mines for bitcoins by themselves anymore - they join a
pool so you get a small guaranteed payout.

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criddell
I have no interest in a small guaranteed payout.

I'm asking if I have $20 to buy Powerball tickets (with a chance to win $1
billion) or $20 to buy electricity for my i5-based mining machine, how do the
odds compare?

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Vadoff
I'm not sure what the exact house edge is on Powerball. But let's say it's
20%.

Due to dynamic difficulty adjustments, the profit for miners is just a bit
more than the cost of electricity. However, this is only true for those who
have the best specialized mining equipment and the cheapest electricity in the
world. For an average person living in a typical area, even with dedicated
equipment, you'd probably be far under breaking even. Most likely much less
than 20%.

And that's with specialized equipment (costing thousands of dollars). With
your home computer, it'll be hundreds of thousands of times less efficient per
watt of electricity to mine bitcoin. Even for other cryptocurrencies that
might be resistant to specialized equipment, you'd still most likely be over
10x less efficient.

Go with the powerball tickets.

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thisisit
This script is mining monero which uses Cryptonight algorithm. This algorithm
kinda famous for being CPU mine-able unlike other cryptocurrencies.

Now, the coinhive page is completely blocked by all the plugins so I cannot
find the exact story. But, if memory serves correctly, during the launch devs
have presented a story where they use the script on a forum. The results were
pretty impressive with payout reaching ~ 1k USD.

Though there is a section which clearly says this is not economical, my take
on this was that they wanted to entice enough people to mine using their
script.

The devs also promised to look into this kind of abuse but I guess that is not
happening.

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Tinyyy
This isn’t mining Bitcoin, it’s using Coinhive
([https://coinhive.com](https://coinhive.com)) to mine Monero

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baxtr
This is smart...or maybe not. Has anybody done the calculation here? I am very
curious to know into how much $s the 10s translate to

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nerdponx
Not to mention that some (perhaps many) people will be running their devices
off of the store's own power outlets. So the store will actually be paying the
electrical bill for at least some of that mining.

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cgb223
How much Monero can a company reasonably mine using this tactic?

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ben_jones
I'm picturing going into a cafe, using the wifi, and my phone turning into a
hot coal or my laptop fan blowing me back out of my seat.

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crb002
CPU for services seems legit as long as they give an affirmative checkoff.

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TazeTSchnitzel
It's stealing money from the user via their electricity bill.

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gentooinstall
Not really if it's at Starbucks

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TazeTSchnitzel
If you're using their wall outlet.

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shak77
I bet this was done by a contractor without Starbucks permission.

