Is browser-mining still profitable?

Has anyone tried javascript mining? I heard it's possbile to mine XMR using clients' CPU with javascript

Profitable -
1) on your own machine? Probably not.
2) on machines that you don't own? Yepp. How to do that? Off-topic, and possibly too blackhat to discuss here.

Gogol said:

Profitable -
1) on your own machine? Probably not.
2) on machines that you don't own? Yepp. How to do that? Off-topic, and possibly too blackhat to discuss here.

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I don't believe it's too blackhat at all, some people argue that it's ethical and more user-friendly then showing advertisment.
But all the articles I found regarding the subject go back to 2018. It seems after that date the profit from browser mining became too low.

Injecting it onto other user's browser without their consent is unethical. I think @bartosimpsonio had mentioned this earlier in one of his posts. Won't be profitable unless on a massive scale.

HustleTong said:

Injecting it onto other user's browser without their consent is unethical.

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Exactly my point too. However, it is debatable.

Gogol said:

Exactly my point too. However, it is debatable.

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If you think about it, it's no different than any other "heavy" javascript running out there.

When I access some sites, I hear the cooler fan speed up like a jet engine. There's no difference between a website rendering 3D shit and crypto mining.

So it is debatable IMO - why is it wrong, exactly? Just because the site owner is making $ from it?

On your own machine, the answer is no.
On others machine, absolutely. However its a blackhat stuff for another conversation.

bartosimpsonio said:

If you think about it, it's no different than any other "heavy" javascript running out there.

When I access some sites, I hear the cooler fan speed up like a jet engine. There's no difference between a website rendering 3D shit and crypto mining.

So it is debatable IMO - why is it wrong, exactly? Just because the site owner is making $ from it?

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Yupp exactly. It's technically not different than running some 3d engine on the browser. However, when people hack other people's sites and inject a crypto miner; that's not ethical. Neither is it ethical to inject the payload as a MITM (Man in the Middle).

Additionally, when I visit a site that does 3d rendering/or some other heavy loading stuffs; I know it is for some output that either I am going to see or consume somehow. Vs the crypto miner which does nothing, and just eats up my resources.

Funnily, client scripts like ga, youtube/FB's ajax scripts etc are not that lightweight as well. They don't compare to a crypto miner probably, but they are still pretty heavy. Thankfully enough, we have ublock now a days.

silentwandererr said:

I don't believe it's too blackhat at all, some people argue that it's ethical and more user-friendly then showing advertisment.
But all the articles I found regarding the subject go back to 2018. It seems after that date the profit from browser mining became too low.

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Tell that too the FBI

What options are available today? Are those miners can be good options for movie streaming site for example?

Gogol said:

Yupp exactly. It's technically not different than running some 3d engine on the browser. However, when people hack other people's sites and inject a crypto miner; that's not ethical. Neither is it ethical to inject the payload as a MITM (Man in the Middle).

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Oh got your point now. Yea obviously that's not only unethical it's probably downright illegal.

I'm not going to get into ethics as ultimately I'm not going to convince you and you're not going to convince me either way. So let's talk hard facts and numbers...

It depends entirely on how long you can get your visitors to stay. I'm running a Ryzen 7 3700X and the estimated value, if I mine XMR 24/7 is 14.11. 730 hours a month would mean you'd get 730/14.11=0.019 or just below 2 cents an hour from me.

Now there's a couple issues, the biggest being unless you can market to nerds most your visitors will have shittier CPU's (I'm not saying mine is bleeding edge but average guy likely has even less); but if you have a site that attracts nerds they're going to notice the added load when visiting and leave. So 2 cents an hour per visitor is ultimately a pipe dream and I'd expect something well under a penny.

And then how do you make a site so intriguing that people will want to be on it 24/7? That's likely impossible, at best if people sleep 8 hours, you're looking at 16 hours. 14.11/3=4.70 & 4.70*2=9.40 to get us 2/3rd of the time. So if you can get me to stay on your site for 16 hours a day, you'd make a whopping $9.40/month. That guy with a laptop? chromebook? Dell Optiplex? you MIGHT make $5.

Now if you got a website that keep me on it for 16 hours a day, I'm going to take a random guess that you could have a subscription model and I'd pay more than $5/month for access.

So yes, it still profitable, but it's not profitable enough to make it worth doing above your other options.