Coinhive Cryptojacking Service Will Shut Down Next Week

Coinhive, an in-browser Monero cryptocurrency miner famous for being abused by malware gangs, announced this week its intention to shut down all operations next month, on March 8, 2019. From a report: The service cited multiple reasons for its decision in a blog post published yesterday. "The drop in hash rate (over 50%) after the last Monero hard fork hit us hard," the company said. "So did the 'crash' of the crypto currency market with the value of XMR depreciating over 85% within a year." "This and the announced hard fork and algorithm update of the Monero network on March 9 has lead us to the conclusion that we need to discontinue Coinhive," the company said. Coinhive said all in-browser Monero mining will stop working after March 8, and registered users will have until April 30 to withdraw funds from their accounts. The service, which launched in mid-September 2017, promoted itself as an alternative to classic banner ads. In its heyday, the site was making around $250,000 per month, according to some estimates.

Bubble

[XXongo]

Right now, cryptocurrency is in a bubble: people use it to speculate; they don't use it as a currency.

To be currency, the value has to be stable.

Maybe some day some cryptocurrency will be stable, and will be usable as a currency. But right now? Nope.

The damage has been done

[xack]

The “money” generated by the site is minimal compared to the bandwidth and electric bills caused by the mining, and most mining was blocked by adblockers and firewalls anyway.

Re:

[doconnor]

Ads also use a lot of bandwidth and electricity and also have virtually no tangible benefit.

Re:

[tepples]

The benefit of ads is that they allow smaller transactions of access in exchange for attention than the credit card networks allow. A credit card processor will take 30 cents per transaction, as will an ACH processor. This rules out pay-per-page through commonly used electronic payment methods.

Re: The damage has been done

[peragrin]

I am actually getting to the point of setting up a dns whitelist for ads. Block every viral ad at the router for all my guests.

Think of the bandwidth savings.

I for one

[Anonymous Coward]

will be glad when the entire cryptocurrency thing is a pile of smoldering embers. It's a promise that cannot be delivered upon with any real traction because there are so many competing standards. And the fact that bad actors are drawn to it like moths to a flame. I've been running No Coin in my browsers as well as blocking it on my Pi-hole since it was a thing.