The concept of mining Monero with one’s browser has received a very bad rap over the past few weeks. That isn’t a big surprise, mind you, as none of the solutions we saw come to market allowed users to opt out. Thankfully, there is at least one website on which this feature can be turned on and off depending on users’ preferences. In fact, it is disabled by default, which seems to be the smart decision from a long-term perspective.
Making In-browser Mining an Option
A lot of websites would gladly get rid of their traditional advertising models in favor of something that more people might agree to. With the rising number of people using ad blockers these days, traditional advertisements are not necessarily a great source of income right now. Then again, it is difficult to find a suitable replacement, especially one that won’t dissuade users from visiting your site for the information they are looking for.
Mining cryptocurrency using site visitors’ browsers is one option being explored right now. All it takes is a few lines of JavaScript code to make this venture a success. Unfortunately, this mining process cannot be turned on or off, forcing users to sacrifice some of their computer resources while browsing a website. That has rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, for obvious reasons.
Thankfully, it seems at least one news website is planning to make a positive decision in this regard. On Reddit, there is a thread about a new site known as ToTheMoon which uses a cryptocurrency mining script as an opt-in feature to support content creators. Users can click on this widget to successfully mine cryptocurrency on behalf of the site owners, or they can ignore the function and browse the site normally. When using the mining feature, the site will use a bit more CPU power in the process, of course.
More importantly, the mining process on this particular site doesn’t require any user information whatsoever. Instead, the site guarantees that the whole mining process is completely anonymous and that nothing is collected. It is always hard to tell if that is true, but we will have to take the site owner’s word for it. Also importantly, the Monero mining process doesn’t start automatically, which is a very good thing.
Last but not least, the site owners have limited the hashing power itself to ensure no systems are overloaded. At maximum, it will only use 30% of spare CPU cycles to mine Monero as long as the feature is enabled by the user and he or she remains on the website. Whether or not a lot of people will decide to support this site by dedicating spare CPU cycles in the mining process remains to be seen. This is an interesting take on things, though, as it goes to show such a feature never has to be mandatory in the first place.
Whether or not we will see other platforms integrate such a feature as an opt-in method also remains to be determined. It is good to explore alternative solutions in this regard, though, as no one should be forced to watch advertisements or dedicate CPU power to mining Monero on someone else’s behalf. It will be interesting to see whether or not other sites will follow ToTheMoon’s example moving forward, but for now, this appears just to be a unique experiment.
