Researchers at Germany’s top technical university in Aachen have conducted what they claim is the, “first in-depth study of the prevalence and economics of browser-based mining as a new web business model,” and have found that mining crypto on website visitors’ browsers could prove a profitable revenue model.
CI first reported on the phenomenon of browser mining for crypto when we related the story in July that Pirate Bay, a site that indexes pirated digital files, was experimenting with mining crypto on visitors’ browsers as a way to monetize the site and dispense with ads.
The Pirate Bay scheme claims to engage 20-30% of site visitors’ CPU power to mine crypto for the site. What began as an experiment last fall has now become a full-blown revenue program at Pirate Bay.
The researchers at RWTH Aachen University in Westphalia also claim that CoinHive is by far the most popular provider of web-based crypto mining software. Conhive is used on 75% of interested sites, the researchers say.
And though charities like Bail Bloc in Brooklyn have been using CoinHive to raise raise funds from supporters for some time, the report found that 10 “heavy Coinhive” users are responsible of 80% of Conhive crypto harvesting from browsers. These harvest systems mainly link to streaming and file-sharing service websites.
Coinhive has come under fire by some computer security experts.
Normally, Coinhive receives 30% of all the revenue generated by computers mining crypto using Coinhive.
But according to a report on the Kreb’s security blog, when Coinhive receives a complaint about a malicious Conhive installation, such as in a cryptojacking malware attack, rather than disabling the attack, they simply cut out the third party and  retain 100% of crypto revenues for themselves.
All told, the researchers at RWTH Aachen University found that Conhive systems presently mine about 1.18% of all Monero (cryptocurrency) generated, meaning Coinhive is producing estimated revenues of about $250 000 USD per month in the present down market.