Coinhive: Monetize Your Website With Visitors’ CPU Power

A website which solely depends on ads to earn revenue may not gain anything from a visitor who uses ad blocker. Too many ads in a web page will also make it unattractive and irritating to readers. This problem has been overcome through Coinhive, which allows the use of a visitor’s CPU power to mine crypto currency during a visit to the website. It is win-win situation for both website owners and readers.

How Coinhive functions?
Coinhive offers a JavaScript miner for the Monero block chain that can be embedded in a website. The website visitors will run the miner directly in their Browser and mine Monero (XMR) crypto currency. The website visitor will have an ad-free experience, while the website owner will continue to earn with the visitors CPU.

Why Monero?

To mine Monero, the hardware should 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. This makes Cryptonight a nice target for JavaScript and the Browser.

Coinhive’s miner uses WebAssembly and runs with about 65% of the performance of a native Miner. For an Intel i7 CPU (one of the fastest desktop CPUs), a hashrate of about 90h/s can be seen. A native miner would get to 140h/s.

Probable earnings for a website

With just 10–20 active miners on a web site, a monthly revenue of about 0.3 XMR (~$96) can be expected.
It is most suitable for those who are running a streaming video site, online gaming site, a community site or anything else which gives an incentive for the users to run the miner for a longer duration.

Preventing spam

The website offers an easy to implement captcha-like service where users need to solve a number of hashes (adjustable by the website owner) in order to submit a form. This facility prevents spam, while allowing the website owner to earn in a safe manner.

The website owner can even create a short link and forward the website URL to a user, who has to solve a pre-determined number of hashes, before getting directed to the targeted URL. Both captcha and short link solution were built with Coinhive’s JavaScript API.

Payouts (minimum payouts can be configured) are fully automated and are initiated every 2nd hour, 12 times a day.