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Cryptocurrency mining was all the rage in 2011. You could get up to 50 Bitcoins at a time if you've managed to get the block premium and you've solved the hashing problems that are complicated to confirm the transactions. However, when more and more miners joined the race, the difficulty of self-regulation of the Bitcoin protocol meant that the CPUs of laptops and desktops were no longer relevant in the Bitcoin mining arena.
Claiming block awards was now reduced to a race for those with the largest share of processing power (hash). Coins became more valuable in 2012 and 2013, and cryptocurrency miners started looking for smarter ways to increase processing power. Progress has been made on the software and hardware front. ASICs (or specific integrated miners came to play, eliminating CPUs and ushering in the GPU extraction era.
The golden years of the Bitcoin GPU spanned from 2013 to 2017. It was very profitable and brought more users to the blockchain scene. Bitcoin was not the only cryptocurrency to be extracted – other profitable currencies were Ethereum (ETH), Tezos (XTZ) and Monero (XMR). When Bitcoin and most other altcoins peaked in December 2017, miners' interest in "easy" profits could also be made. So a Bitcoin block block blockin award could easily get $ 100,000 for 10 to 20 minutes of processing time. This is when big names like Bitmain and large mining pools like Antpool have started to dominate the industry and have turned away hobbyists.
The rise of miners in the web browser
At the end of 2017, the hash power needed to extract profitably was too much due to greater mining difficulties. People started to see how much potential this new financial system had. The difficulty and the extremely high cost of setting up mining drilling rigs have alienated people. This led to an unreasonable request for mining opportunities from all the people who were late to the party. Around the same time, ingenious miners developed a new form of coin collection – using computing power from distributed networks.
Why do websites use only Monero and not Bitcoin?
The developers of data mining protocols have come up with ways to take advantage of website traffic. Websites with a large number of visitors can be monetized using their extra computing power. Cryptocurrency miners would not focus on Bitcoin alone. Monero, which was therefore a new currency for privacy, began to become more viable than Bitcoin for newbies and low budget hobbyists. It did not require too much money, know-how or super-fast computers for mine. Dash is another popular currency that could be extracted this way.
How browser mining works
According to a Symantec Security report, coins can be extracted for the use of JavaScript APIs that run on the browser. Instead of downloading a dedicated executable file from, for example, Minergate and running it on a computer, mining extensions instruct the browser to solve mathematical equations (used to confirm cryptographic transactions), using the client's computer.
The biggest developer of the browser miners is called Coinhive. The startup has created a very accurate package that allows website owners to write a few lines of JavaScript code in their internal code and to distribute it to their visitors.
Coinhive has proposed a new business model that offers a better browsing experience for site visitors while earning money for the owner. In exchange for fewer ads, users would have activated Monero or Dash mining during their stay on the site.
So, why all the noise?
This transparent model made sense. However, whenever there is an opportunity for corruption, corruption inevitably takes place. It is human nature. Cryptocurrencies of mining for advertising revenue would have been a perfect way to go if there was only transparency.
Coinhive's system was abused on the left, right and center. Sites would allow non-consensual invisible extraction without the consent of visitors. The first major site to do this was The Pirate Bay, a popular file sharing and torrenting platform.
The Pirate Bay receives hundreds of millions of visits per year, but has little income. The platform can not display AdSense and AdWords advertisements due to the nature of the content it provides. Google would not allow it. For years, he has relied on donations and some black hat advertisements from the womb of the internet to keep the servers running.
The Monero mining promised a brand new revenue stream for the torrent site and secretly distributed the code on the front page. In a few days, users discovered them and felt that the practice was malevolent.
Unfortunately, since it requires the user valuable computer processing power, it automatically becomes classified as an attacker. More and more sites have begun to embed incognito software, including popular content streaming sites. Showtimes, a site that charges users to view its content, has been hacked – with hackers embedding malicious code on their pages. With the growth of the hashpower needed to extract new XMR coins, miners often exhale the CPU's processing capacity to the maximum, thereby slowing down everything else.
It soon became a telltale signal that if your computer became super-slow during a given site visit, it would probably have Monero-mining enabled in the background.
How to know if a website is using your CPU to extract Bitcoin
The fastest way to find out if there have been cryptojacking on the website you are visiting is to observe the behavior of your computer when you are in a particular site. If your computer becomes ridiculously slow, you may want to look under the hood.
If you are using a Windows operating system, right-click the taskbar and open Task Manager. Take a look at the processes running in the background. If the CPU usage is more than 75 percent, it's a huge red flag that something out of the norm is happening.
If you're using a Mac, open Spotlight and search for the Activity Monitor. From there, you can see which processes are absorbing bandwidth. If you can not accurately determine what your resources are devouring, close your browser and see if your computer's processing speed improves.
If your computer's performance is marked, you may have accessed a website with encrypted malware enabled, so you can decide whether to return to the site or not.
What happens if you want to access the website but do not want to be checked out?
If you are not a fan of an extended CPU, but do you still need to enter a site that has been encrypted? To do so, you install an ad blocker that prevents mining scripts from working. If you're using Chrome, a good block extension is Adguard. You can also download the Opera browser, which has an integrated lock to keep miners away. MinerBlock is another great addition to this list.
Keep safe
Ultimately, you need to keep your computer safe from malicious attacks. Make sure you have the antivirus updated and in good working condition (with the settings set at the highest security level) before visiting potentially infected websites. Be careful not to download suspicious files or e-mail attachments because they may have executable programs that could install mining clients on the laptop.
