
Ask HN: Why did Coinhive, the in-browser crypto miner, fail? - jungle_bells
It&#x27;s really hard for me to understand why it failed as they seemed to be the PERFECT alternative to running ads. The official statement doesn&#x27;t really cut it for me, what are your thoughts on this?
======
hombre_fatal
I'm not sure how it's a perfect alternative. It seems worse on almost every
dimension.

You're stuck between running this miner covertly (scummy) or asking for
permission (who is going to click yes?).

How much of Coinhive's income comes from users who are unknowingly running the
code? It seems like a move towards more user-hostility, not less.

The one time I saw an actual fit for the end user was an online game that
would let you turn on the miner to win in-game coins. Who else can pull off an
opt-in?

~~~
randartie
I routinely disable my adblock for certain news websites because they tell me
to, otherwise I can't see their content. Websites asking for 'opt-in' does
work. It works on me all the time.

~~~
hombre_fatal
Sure, and you are unique in this regard. Just look the developments of
counter-antiadblocker rules making it on to Easylist. People don't even see
those pleas.

Of course, the other issue is that this was only feasible under very specific
and temporary circumstances, so it cannot be the answer to ads. Coinhive is
done. The experiment failed.

------
chroem-
The performance disparity between browser-based javascript and specialized
mining hardware is so large, that you will be hard-pressed to generate enough
revenue to support a website.

~~~
entelia09
I remember reading a research paper estimating that coinhive made over
$250,000 every month. What do you think about this?

~~~
bitxbitxbitcoin
Hope this helps illustrate the point:

That $250,000 every month amount was made at the cost of way more than
$250,000 worth of electricity.

~~~
entelia09
But it wasn't coinhive or coinhive's users who were paying for it. Website
visitors carried the cost...

~~~
JshWright
We were all paying for it...

~~~
nukemandan
But the cost to remove ads here is very worth spending that electricity over
my attention.

~~~
criddell
What about the environmental and other external costs?

I run an ad blocker most of the time because crappy ads and ad-tech uses a lot
of bandwidth and battery. Crypto-mining is even worse for power consumption.

------
slig
Well, for one, AV software started to classify any website with its code as
'infected' with malware. Then adblockers blocked their script, and even today
their website doesn't load properly with uBlock activated.

~~~
shoe_hn
These are definitely important issues but they don't sound like show-stoppers.
Many people use anti virus software and adblockers but then again many don't!

Additionally they (or some alternative) may have been able to improve the
software and create a simple consent process to avoid being blacklisted.

~~~
tmarman
I tried it on a couple of sites I have with ~1k users using pretty heavily. I
made $1.50 USD over a couple of months, and most complained that it was being
blocked/giving security warnings when visiting the site.

Not that I am making much from ads either, but it just really wasn't worth it.
Affiliate revenue, while small on a grand scheme, was much more effective .

------
aboutruby
Spamming the adblockers to whitelist them (and their authedmine alternative)
definitely didn't help
[https://github.com/easylist/easylist/issues/712](https://github.com/easylist/easylist/issues/712)

~~~
jhall1468
While I agree that they didn't handle it well, I'm mixed on this. While I
think putting a miner on a site covertly is unethical, I also think blocking
something that's not an ad in an ad-blocker is equally unethical.

I think a miner like this could provide an interesting way for people to
monetize their content, as long as it's opt-in, but blocking a non-ad like
this just totally deflates the argument that ad-blockers are about privacy or
intrusiveness, and their really about people having their cake and eating it
too.

~~~
kalleboo
I don't think any of the mainstream blocking plug-ins claim to just be ad
blockers. E.g. The first line on the uBlock origin Readme:

> _uBlock Origin is NOT an "ad blocker": it is a wide-spectrum blocker --
> which happens to be able to function as a mere "ad blocker". The default
> behavior of uBlock Origin when newly installed is to block ads, trackers and
> malware sites_

Any third party scripts tend to fall under "trackers" (stuff like typekit,
disqus often gets blocked by default as well), something that just burns your
CPU in the background without approval could be classified as malware.

------
exxybebbi
The real reason they failed (mining efficiency aside) is because the
technology was co-opted by criminals that embedded the miner into hacked sites
and display advertisements without permission. This caused them to land on
every single anti-virus and domain blacklist out there.

------
amiller2571
I was still working in the security field (MSSP SOC) when Coinhive came out.
It quickly because one of the prominent "threats" we had to deal with. All of
our clients wanted any site that had Coinhive on it, whether or not the site
owners added it or criminals did, blocked. It was view by nearly everyone in
cyber security, including AV companies, as malware. It got a bad reputation
because many sites didn't allow you to opt-in, and many didn't even tell you
they were running it.

------
root_axis
The idea was absurd from the outset. A few minutes of mobile CPU mining in a
browser is a nearly worthless pittance.

~~~
DATACOMMANDER
Yes, and probably a much smaller pittance than that earned through ad revenue
from the average brief visit, which means that this idea cannot succeed if
it’s framed as an alternative to ads, unless a massive number of people are
willing to pay for content with spare CPU cycles rather than with ad
impressions. That seems highly unlikely for a number of reasons, chiefly that
the demographic that would even understand the pitch is likely contained
almost entirely within the demographic that uses adblockers.

A better strategy, then, would be to completely dissociate the idea from ads,
and simply make it easy for content creators to ask users if they’d like to
support their content via in-browser mining. Make it unobtrusive for viewers
and both frictionless and highly configurable for creators. The goal should
not be to maximize the number of viewers who consent, but to keep the
potential loss in viewership and/or good will very close to zero. Let content
creators decide how aggressively they want to pitch the idea to their viewers,
with the default being about as aggressive as a small link off to the side
soliciting donations.

The result would likely be an extremely high ratio of new widget installations
to marginal unit of revenue, but it also wouldn’t totally crash and burn.

------
sokoloff
This is a particularly bad experience for mobile users with battery and CPU
cooling limitations to computing.

While the growth of mobile probably wasn't a primary reason, I suspect the
founders may have seen that the future didn't look great, even if they could
solve the monetization of exploits and collapse of crypto prices overall
headwinds. With crypto pricing falling to near the power input costs when
mined on ASICs and GPUs, CPU mining from Javascript was going to be a case
where users paid $1 for ~$0.10 of crypto which only a tiny sliver of the
original input ($1) went to the content creator.

------
seibelj
A million CPUs would not be as efficient mining Bitcoin as a single ASIC.
There are no coins where CPU mining is as good as GPU. JavaScript is also
inefficient compared to native programs.

Overall, it probably didn't generate very much money. Mining is a commodity.
An ad click is worth orders of magnitude more.

~~~
slig
They were mining Monero, not Bitcoin.

~~~
seibelj
CPU mining XMR is similarly not efficient compared to GPU

~~~
lawn
As Monero currently has ASICs running on the network no they're not.

But without them yes they are _profitable_ especially if you're not paying for
electricity as in this case.

~~~
rudiv
I thought Monero was designed to be resistant to ASICs? Please correct me if
I'm wrong, I don't have that much knowledge about crypto₹.

~~~
paulmd
There is no such thing as ASIC-proof. You can make an ASIC for any
deterministic algorithm.

"ASIC-resistance", in this context, only means that ASICs can be held to a low
multiple of CPU/GPU efficiency. So ASICs can be 10x as efficient as a CPU/GPU,
but not 10k-1m times as efficient like they can on something like SHA.

Unfortunately, profit trends towards zero (towards cost of production) until
prices change, so having a 10x advantage is still actually quite big. That
means you're making at least a small profit when everyone else is forced to
turn off their rigs.

In practice this means that ASIC-resistance, as a method of decentralizing
control of the network, doesn't work. Big farms pay cheaper rates for
electricity (in China, sometimes zero, by stealing it or bribing local
officials), and have insider access to much more efficient ASIC hardware than
the general public does. So when profit declines to zero, they inherit the
network by virtue of being the only miners who remain profitable.

~~~
Animats
_There is no such thing as ASIC-proof. You can make an ASIC for any
deterministic algorithm._

True. Although you could probably design an algorithm which requires so many
of the capabilities of a CPU, like a fast 64-bit FPU and a lot of cache, that
the transistor count of an ASIC would approach that of a general-purpose CPU
produced in much greater volume. This would make special-purpose hardware not
cost effective.

~~~
paulmd
That's basically the idea of ProgPOW, which is a proposed algorithm that
Ethereum may switch to in an attempt to kick ASICs off the network.

[https://github.com/ifdefelse/ProgPOW](https://github.com/ifdefelse/ProgPOW)

The problem is that you still are only taking an infinitely small chunk of the
space of all possible Turing algorithms. For example we are not considering
any program that lasts longer than say 12 cache hits and 20 math operations
(proposed numbers). That means you don't need as much hardware to implement an
ASIC as you would a general-purpose processor.

Such algorithms can never possibly contemplate the full space of Turing
programs unless you solve the halting problem (because we can't trust
participants to give us a fairly chosen algorithm, and presumably we don't
want to select a hashing stage that never terminates). This approach will
always consider a tiny, fixed area of the problem space and will thus always
be amenable to acceleration from specialized hardware.

Remember that old chestnut, "anybody can come up with a crypto algorithm that
they themselves cannot break"? You can add a corollary to that: "anyone can
come up with a hashing algorithm that they themselves cannot design an ASIC
for".

We've been through this over and over again. I remember when Ethereum was
supposed to be impossible to accelerate with ASICs. I remember when Monero and
ZCash were supposed to be impossible to accelerate. But when you put hundreds
of millions of dollars of free money on the line, very smart people get
creative.

The idea of ASIC resistance can be summarized as making specialized hardware
no more efficient than general hardware. And that's simply an impossible task.
Specialized hardware will always be at least _somewhat_ more efficient than
general hardware. Maybe not hugely, but it doesn't need to be hugely more
efficient, 5-10x more efficient is more than enough to shift control over to
ASIC insiders.

On top of that, ASICs pose massive advantages for deployment even apart from
efficiency advantages. One box that you plug a power cable and ethernet cable
into replaces two mining rigs with finicky, delicate riser cables and a dozen
GPUs precariously strung from wire shelves. ASICs don't crash anywhere near as
much either. Literally just having the same efficiency but being 10x as easy
to deploy is still a massive win.

You can still rotate algorithms every 6 months, but the clock starts ticking
when you propose an algorithm. It took four months from the last switchover
before Monero had ASICs on the network again. Presumably they were designing
as soon as the algorithm was proposed, and taping out as soon as the
switchover was announced.

ASICs are inevitable, and it may be better to simply accept _democratic_
control of ASICs rather than insiders with control of them. If you switch
every couple months you disincentivize ASIC holders from releasing them to the
public (and revealing their existence), instead they will hold them private so
they don't trigger an algorithm change. Which is exactly the centralization
that you're supposedly trying to avoid.

------
adgasf
Speculating here, but a browser JS engine is not the ideal mining vehicle,
particularly on mobile. I think you would have to have enormous volume to
actually make any money. A significant amount of that would then go to the
site owner (why else would they use it?), leaving very little profit for
CoinHive itself.

------
tosh
I think in most cases “failed” just means the founders think there are other
(clearer) opportunities to pursue. Doesn’t necessarily mean what they were
working on didn’t make sense.

IMHO there still is quite an opportunity to find substitutes for ads that
provide revenue for websites and aren’t as annoying as ads whether it is
mining or something like SETI or something like re-captcha.

Would love to see more in this direction.

------
tnolet
Just adding a datapoint. I run a SaaS where people can run their own
(Javascript) code. The first thing I did was block any Coinhvive script as
those were the first obvious abusers of the service.

Coinhive is now, for me at least, always associated with scammers.

------
entelia09
This is a big question for me too! Especially since they didn't seem to have
any major reason to burn a lot of cash or to run out of money! Was it maybe a
lawsuit, fraud or regulatory issue? I would LOVE to know.

~~~
detaro
their own statement: _The drop in hash rate (over 50%) after the last Monero
hard fork hit us hard. So did the “crash“ of the crypto currency market with
the value of XMR depreciating over 85% within a year. This and the announced
hard fork and algorithm update of the Monero network on March 9 has lead us to
the conclusion that we need to discontinue Coinhive._

[https://coinhive.com/blog/en/discontinuation-of-
coinhive](https://coinhive.com/blog/en/discontinuation-of-coinhive) (you
probably need to whitelist that in your adblocker to read it)

Sounds like "lots of work to do soon and not making all that much money, not
worth it". (surely being known as "malware" didn't help either...)

~~~
Scoundreller
I think this is the best kind of site to use archive.is on:
[http://archive.is/6gbeU](http://archive.is/6gbeU)

