Lately, clicked a link from those “funny” programming related Facebook pages, read the article and did not close the tab. No harm done, right? Well, after 10-15 minutes I heard the CPU fan revving more than usual and I thought that it’s quite odd. I fired up Task Manager, and I found out that my Chrome tab is running on 100% CPU usage. Odd, what was going on?

I immediately remembered an article I read a days back that Pirate Bay have implemented a script to mine coins in the background.  I fired up Developer Tools, and unsurprisingly, I found out that the site was using CoinHive.

What’s my take on this? First and foremost, as a server, it’s Illegal to use your client’s CPU cycles without letting them know upfront what you’re doing. This is essentially turning your clients into botnets. Second of all, if you’re going to do such task, at least give the client some breathing space. These coin miners can seriously hammer the CPU; since they are multi threaded, they can easily cause a 100% CPU load!

Alright then, let’s now discuss a bit from an ethic point of view. Chances are that if you are running a legit / legal site (such as this blog), you don’t want to turn your precious visitors into mining machines. Thus probably the servers which end up using such services will be more shady sites, such as Torrent Sites, Streaming Sites, some (illegal) sharing sites and any other shady service. This means that these people do not care much on how they’ll monetize their service, be it (shady) advertisements or cryptocurrency mining.

Though this had me thinking, from a consumer point of view, should I prefer giving away CPU usage for a couple of minutes in exchange for their services? Or should I prefer being bombarded with really terrible advertisements (which if interacted, can download some really malicious software). I mean, I understand that CPU usage hogging is very annoying, but so is getting bombarded with adverts. If I were in a position where I had to choose to give some CPU usage for a couple of minutes versus those adverts, I’d choose the CPU usage choice any day. But then, of course, you can always use a good Ad-Blocker!

Some closing thoughts – is it possible that sites that rely purely on adverts have a choice to finally remove (or tone down) the use of adverts, in exchange of using the client’s machine CPU Cycles? From a legal standpoint? No. From a realistic point? Probably not, or at least. I really doubt. Maybe if they strike a balance between tasteful ads and low CPU consumption? Only the future will tell. Or maybe it’s just a fad, like 3D TVs (but that’s an argument for another day).

(Article image credit: https://insight.jbs.cam.ac.uk/2016/could-cryptocurrency-help-the-bottom-billion)