Topic: Embedable Javascript Bitcoin miner for your website - page 5. (Read 149663 times)

If only the people who are using this script would ask their users. But this script was intentionally designed to work in the background without people noticing it. And right now, I see no way of effectively blocking it. Banning the bitp.it domain is not enough, because people can easily copy and modify the script and host it on their website. Turning off JS completely renders most of the websites useless.

This shit isn't even a good idea from a technological standpoint, because 1bitc0inplz just figured out a way to waste even more cpu time (doing calculations with JS instead of native code, seriously?)

Don't get me wrong. I'm not against it if it is used in a proper way. But with all the programmer dudes out here: you should know best that you don't want someone else's software to force something on your computer. That is, yes, Malware.

I think it's fine if you allow your users a choice. So far, I have yet to see a website that does this. That's why I'm criticizing what is happening here.

bitp.it was designed as a background script that the user gets no knowledge of. Otherwise there would be some form of notification. There isn't. So this is bad, mhkay?

EDIT: I created a pillory thread in this topic and it has already taken effect: bitp.it was removed from Detexify! So I guess even website owners see this is a bad idea.

Dude, seriously? The guy developed a brand new miner and now he is a greedy evil motherfucker who steals old laydies purses?

I think this js miner it's an awesome idea and there are lots of good ways to use it.

Instead of a "donate" button you could just have a "donate cpu time" in your website where people could click to willingly start the mining.

Are you proposing we should be against the technology because it can be used in unethical ways?! Seriously? On a BITCOIN forum??!

Malware, short for malicious software, consists of programming (code, scripts, active content, and other software) designed to disrupt or deny operation, gather information that leads to loss of privacy or exploitation, gain unauthorized access to system resources, and other abusive behavior.

Congratulations.
Don't inflate my electricity bill only for your gain, you people. Seriously.

I'm afraid of that too, yes.

Still, things like these will effectively prevent Bitcoin from gaining real market penetration. The people using these JS miners right now are as a matter of fact going against the interests of their website users for this - they will feel that it's not worth the hastle, sooner or later. I very much hope that they will LOSE users this way. We should make a pillory thread so that we all know which websites to stay away from. Maybe even Google will mark the sites as "Malware"? I really do hope so! And they have very good reason to do that. After all it's in their interest to prevent their Android users from visiting those websites...

Besides that, I hope that if you compare the gains (a few 0.01 BTC every few days) vs. the losses (in users visiting your website), you will notice that this system has no real benefit. JS is clearly not made for Bitcoin mining.

But who am I talking to... too many people here only want to trade Bitcoin for $$$ anyways! Too many people that aren't the least bit interested in Bitcoin's reputation. I think we shouldn't give these people a forum here to speak out about their wicked plans, anyways.

Champion of the bitcoin movement is more like it. Trust me. Speaking out against the development of java cpu and webcl web miners will get met with much more resistance and lrn2noscript n00b than it will support.
Everyone is in it to make money, and there are no rules or ethics to making money.
 

I agree that this is complete bullshit and a very, very bad idea. This script is now major news on popular German blogger Fefe's page. It is effectively destroying Bitcoin's reputation. Take it down!

Bitcoin is based on the idea that mining is done by users that WANT to mine. *Forcing* other users to mine for you is absolutely awful. Also note that popular browsers like Google Chrome don't even have a JS blocker and once this script is embedded into the other website code, nobody will be able to prevent the miner from running when they want to just normally use the website.
I already see mobile phone companies getting problems because you wasted the user's battery life!

Did anyone figure out the IP adress of the pools used? The only idea I have for preventing this is to prevent the JS miner from connecting with the pool it's mining in. We need a list of pools so that we can block them via an entry in our hosts. This is the only way to stop this effectively, I suppose.

1bitc0inplz, you just made yourself the enemy of the Bitcoin movement.

I have to agree with Nick here. This idea is pure bullshit. Not only do you waste the energy of YOUR users for YOUR benefit without their consent. You are also draining the batteries of notebooks and smartphones, potentially leading to a shorter battery life. Are you willing to pay for that? And I don't want an Internet where every website has 100% cpu usage and causes my cpu cooler to speed up. We've already got flash for that.

Fixed your post for you.

If you block our domain, you're going to miss out on all our fun we have planed for you this weekend 

And, the website's are free to notify the users... in fact, I do think it's a wise idea to fully disclose this type of stuff to your visitors.

Excuse me for being a buzzkill, but this is pure Bullshit.
I really hate the idea of websites forcing me to mine for them without even noticing me. Also, due to the inefficiency of javascript, the hash-rate is ridiculously low, so this is just a criminal waste of electricity.
If you want to monetize your website, use ads or ask for donations, but don't contribute to the already big ecological footprint of bitcoin.
I will block the api.bitp.it-domain now and I urge everyone to do the same!

Running the jsMiner in the UI thread does pose a risk of browser slow downs... however, in my experiences the defaults do not seem to cause any noticeable performance degration on my 2007 year Mac mini. I would be curious to know which browser this user is using, IE and Firefox are severely lacking in the Javascript department.

Also, does your website have (perhaps) some onkeypress event handlers for the particular text boxes this user was filling out? When running in the UI thread our Javascript miner and your website Javascript will be fighting for CPU time.

All of these things play a factory, but in either case one thing you could try and do to make the script even friendlier is to adjust "delay". By default the default between every block of 100 hashes is 30ms. You could try setting delay to a value larger than 30 and see if that improves the situation.

Do let me know if that helps any, and also if you can find out more info about this particular case do let me know as well.

Here's what one of my users said (I had it in "forceUIThread: false" mode at the time)

I have a new computer and when I bring cathinfo up, it is very choppy and slow. Keystrokes lag and hesitate when typing. This does not happen on any other website. Is there something I can do about this?

Maybe the websites that host this mining code could AT LEAST encourage its visitors to upgrade to a decent browser. Maybe a small graphic at the bottom of the page, linking to Chrome and/or Firefox?  Or maybe throw in Safari and Opera as well.

Such buttons would only appear if the user is browsing with some version of IE. 

It's true that Chrome is far, far faster than other browsers, notably IE and Firefox. I'm talking about general browsing performance, as well as Javascript performance. It's not just miners that want fast Javascript; doesn't everyone?

About the only "downsides" with Chrome are for web developers -- but how many of THEM are out there, really, as a percentage of users?

Today we finished up our first round of payouts. Everybody who earned 0.01 BTC or more has received their payment, with one notable exception. There was one account that earned a payout, but didn't have a wallet ID set... we are going to email you shortly and see if we can get your payment sent to you.

Additionally, everyone should now be able to see their pending payout in their console.

We have really been blown away by the level of response that bitp.it has generated. Never would we have imaged that the concept of mining bitcoins from your website would have been as popular as this has turned out to be.

However, there is still a lot of room for us to improve. We realize that even our top performers have received payouts that are lackluster. It would appear that too many people are still using slower browsers, computers, and just not staying on people's websites as long as we had hoped. We do believe that WebCL opens up new possibilities to web mining, but that technology is much too young. Hopefully, with time, it will gain browser acceptance, but until then it's just a 3rd party plugin for one browser that doesn't even work on 64-bit operating systems.

We are *not* discontinuing support of our Javascript miner. Actually, quite the opposite. We have a lot to do to grow this project into something bigger. Over the couple of weeks we plan on rolling out support for:
   - graph of past 10 days' hash rates
   - UI improvements
   - show total across domains
   - show average hash rate per domain

Additionally, we have something REALLY big planned for one week from today. We do not really want to elaborate what it is, but it will be a game changer for bitp.it.

Thank you all again for your support. We really appreciate you helping us fine tune this product.

You are right, time is a luxury, and we (like a lot of us on this forum) are doing this in our free time. We do not want to get into the habit of over-promising, and we also don't like the idea of over-thinking. It is our believe that good software is evolved, not designed. And while we do have a long term plan, the points between A and Z are somewhat undetermined. In fact, it is the feedback from people like yourself and everyone else that has replied to this thread that will help us pick the route between A and Z.

But, I completely understand the need for a roadmap, so that people can make decisions.

Let me put some thought into it, and put some things down on paper.... I will see what I can put up for a short-term road map.

It would be great, if you could publish some kind of roadmap. I understand that having little resources you got to make decisions between optimizing backend stuff and improving the frontend, but the priorities are not very obvious to other users (beta-testers).

What I suggested in the last post - is the smallest bit of information that will help me decide whether it is worth using bitp.it for my own sites and where the bottlenecks are.

Currently, I can only guess how effective this whole thing is

So, please, roadmap of the upcoming features would be useful to keep patience

We already have [email protected], plus you can reach us here, and even on Twitter @bitp_it

We do need to make that more obvious, perhaps a contact us section of the site...


Those are all great suggestions. We are no where near done yet. We have some pretty big stuff in the pipeline.

Good job, guys! Thank you! Now, proceeding to level 2

Feature requests:
1. Some techsupport email or jabber to discuss personal issues in case of need

2. Stats columns:
- khashes per Last Day
- khashes this round
- script requests per Hour
- effectiveness = khashes this round / script requests this round (this will show how effective an average visitor for this site is)

3. Sorting by domain name/selected column. I guess client javascript sort will be a good solution.

4. Totals row - totals for each column where applicable, duplicate the row before and after the table.

Thank you in advance.

That is a good suggestion. I'll add that to our list.


We are going to roll out even more stats this evening. But, do rest assured, if you used the JS we provided you it's working. But, once we roll out these new stats you'll be able to see for yourself.