Monero (XMR) is a cryptocurrency focused around privacy, decentralization and scalability. It was created in April of 2014 and has since seen a huge uptick in adoption. To mine Monero, you have to calculate hashes with an algorithm called Cryptonight. This algorithm is very compute heavy and – while overall pretty slow – was designed to run well on consumer CPUs.
| Current Price of Monero |
I recently discovered that there are services out there that allow you to embed a Monero Javascript miner into a web page. I thought this was an interesting idea and had to try it out for myself. Is it easy to do? How efficient is it? What can it be used for?
Warning: The page you are on is currently utilizing your CPU to mine Monero.
Miner Stats since visiting this page
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| Total Hashes |
I’ve hard coded the miner to only operate using 1 thread so it does not hog your CPU. If you wanted to maximize your Hash Rate you could run a thread per core and these numbers would be 2x-4x greater.
What can it be used for?
- Used as an additional revenue source for websites
- Offer premium services to customers who run miner
How efficient is it?
There is definitely room for improvment when it comes to efficiency. That being said I was pretty impressed how it compared to native mining. Mining in the browser is about 65% as efficient.
The important thing to note here is that a single visitor may not produce much hashing power but if you have a couple hundred people hitting a page it adds up quick.
Is it easy to do?
It is actually extremely easy to do, check out my post on how to do it.