Crypto Mining Scripts Explained

I must give Coinhive cred for introducing AuthedMine:

https://coinhive.com/documentation/authedmine

> The JavaScript Miner, Simple UI and Captcha, when loaded from authedmine.com, will never start without asking for consent from the user

I was hoping for a more technical article though.

I recently wrote a simple scanner that goes through a list of websites, accesses them with a headless browser and measures the CPU performance on the browser's process. It's fairly good at identifying obvious miners, but false positives are abound. It's available here: https://github.com/wrinkl3/MineSweepR

Any idea what metrics could be added for miner detection? I briefly considered proxying the browser's requests against a domain blacklist, but then you'd just end up with a more elaborate version of NoMine.

Does anyone have any data on how much on average the CPU is taxed from the mining?

From Kiro: However, if you give them an incentive to run the miner for longer durations (like giving them in-app rewards) it may be good.

I have such an incentive, that may keep tabs open all day. But if its 100% and degrades performance so much that will discourage users from doing it. I doubt it will work.

How much $$$ can you gain by exploiting visitor's CPUs?

Yet another co-opting of the term "crypto"…

Not the title, which for once does provides a hint that it's about crypto currencies (the "mining" bit). It's the domain name that's disheartening.

Edit: Downvote all you want, I like my language stable. I also like more general terms to be shorter than specific ones.