I’m back
I haven’t posted in a while. Mainly because I was really busy with my morning job, and a lot of other stuff in the between. For all of you who actually kept in line with my blog I would have to say I have done a lot the past 3 years, career-wise.
This post is going to be mainly for talking about Crypto Currency mining, and the related technology.
Fintech
I have worked a lot in the Finance Tech Sector, even before it was the hot word. Unfortunately I didn’t have enough time to actually delve into the Crypto Finance part, only up until recently.
I decided I should have a look at the technological / mining part of a Crypto Currency.
Of course since I am primarily an engineer and not a coder, I decided that the mining must be done in a distributed way and not in a dedicated way most people without any specific technical background do… And that was the issue unfortunately.
Monero JS Mining
Even though my current morning job doesn’t include a lot of JavaScript (or ECMAScript as they renamed it nowadays), I still have some juice left in me. So since JS rules the world language-wise, the logical approach would be a JS miner. There is only one js-miner. And also a nicely laid-out service is Coin-Hive (I’m not linking the site as it will be marked as a malware, more on that later). The crypto currency is Monero (XMR), and it is mainly developed for mining using a CPU and not any specific ASIC just as Bitcoin or Ethereum are. Which also makes it more profitable in my opinion to mine right now, without actually having a monster like computer, which is needed to mine all the other currencies…
Profitablility
Ok, lets face it mining using others pc’s is not that profitable.
Having something like 30-40 visits per day on your website with an average stay of 1-2 mins could probably give out something like 10 cents per day, with roughly 1M hashes.
So it turns out that a lot of people had the same idea as me (a few months back) by using the browser’s V8 to run mining software.
Unfortunately users do not appreciate this. They do not appreciate ads, but also not their CPU spiking up a bit as they like to browse a site they might benefit from.
Frankly, I find this offensive. Especially from google’s part since I managed to set up a distributed miner. I distributed it’s source code (based on a flavour of CryptoNight algorithm) and mining software between some of my sites, using my github account to host the files for the miner, and a few other freeware sites for proxying the traffic for the mining pool.
The Monero Mining Ban
My github account was banned. Also my sites as well. Google thought that all my sites have been hacked and that they were infected with a malware.
Google sent me a lot of e-mails that my sites were infected, and that I should clean them. Apparently it is illegal to serve these assets even if you specifically ask permission from the users (or just simply notify them for this). So, users don’t like ads, since they are using an adblocker, and they don’t like also using their CPU for mining. OK, I get it. We just have to pay for domains and servers for ourselves, for the code and the brain power we burnt to create the content, and just give this away for nothing. Nice. Even though if I somehow have a guy who still owes me a lot of money for a website I helped him create and I don’t want to put him out of business by just closing it down.
Should you need any more info let me know to help you if you want to setup your own JS mining rig.
PS. I have started working on another big open source project which is really nice, you will hear from me again.