Wordpress :: mining with user's CPU

Question

We are in 2020 and I was having a look at this post from 2018 which describes 3 WordPress plug-in we might use to mine Bitcoins through users CPU:

• Simple Monero miner: needs subscription to https://coinhive.com/ (deprecated)
• SpareChange: needs subscription to http://www.sparechange.io/ (deprecated)
• Coin Auth: needs subscription to https://coinhive.com/ (deprecated)

So it looks like there is nothing I can do, I have to do it by myself.

Are there any open source libraries that allows you to add a .js file to the header of your website and mine Bitcoin in 2020?

Why have all the CoinHive services gone away? It looked like a legit way to make money to me, why they are all failed?

Answer 1

The viability of browser based CPU mining on Bitcoin is zero. Bitcoin is not even profitable to mine on dedicated CPUs or GPUs these days, let alone in a browser. Bitcoin mining requires specialized hardware to compete (ASICs).

Monero on the other hand has always favored general purpose compute (CPUs and GPUs), and back when CoinHive started, the PoW algorithm used was at least feasible to be mined in a browser (albeit with very low profitability). The algorithm has however changed since then to RandomX, which whilst it still preserves the favoring of general purpose compute, the RAM requirements make it infeasible to mine in a web browser.

In short, browser based mining Monero is over and Bitcoin mining on anything other than an ASIC is long since dead.