With The Pirate Bay everywhere on the news for using users CPU for mining cryptocurrency, you’ll probably be wondering how it affects you and how to prevent crypto-mining? In simple words, the website will use some of your CPU power (20-30%) to mine cryptocurrency to make money as you enjoy the free content on the website.
As an interesting idea it may be, there are definitely downfalls and you might like not to be a part of it. In this post, I’ll help you understand what cryptocurrency mining means to you as a user, and how you can prevent it.
The good, the bad, and the ugly
Let’s quickly understand the good and bad of this new way of website revenue to make a sound decision:
The good
The biggest advantage of crypto-mining is that it is capable of giving enough revenue to the website owners that could completely remove ads from their websites. We all know how ads can be annoying, but they play a critical role in website revenue and ensure you get free content.
So getting rid of ads in exchange for 20-30% of your CPU resources isn’t a big deal. This is especially good for websites that usually attract inappropriate ads, such as torrent websites.
The bad
Using some of your CPU resources is something bad in its own way. Your PC may slow down, and you’ll also have a hard time running a resource extensive app while visiting such websites. In regular usage, you will not find any big downfalls though.
However, we should also consider that higher CPU usage also means that the PC will consume more electricity. Therefore, there will be an increase in the electricity bill. You are basically, paying the website in the form of a higher electricity bill and a little bit wear and tear on your CPU.
Of course, it can’t put a dent in your electricity bill, but an increase of $2-3 on your bill is worth knowing.
The ugly
The concept is great, and if users start backing it up then we will probably see many sites implementing it to remove those annoying ads for better user experience. This is where the problem will arise. As more and more of your favorite websites will use crypto-mining, there is a higher chance you’ll open multiple websites that will use your CPU to mine cryptocurrencies. Which will, of course, skyrocket your CPU usage and your PC will slow down to a crawl, and may even crash!
In other words, this strategy simply can’t be applied to every website, and it can’t be an alternative to ad revenue. Website owners must stop taking interest in such a strategy as in the long run it’s almost impossible to apply universally.
How to stop cryptocurrency mining in Chrome
There are multiple ways to block cryptocurrency mining, and below I have listed 3 of the easiest ones.
Method 1: Disable Javascript
The mining tools that these websites use are based on a simple Javascript code. So basically disabling Javascript in Chrome will disable mining as well. Of course, disabling Javascript will affect some of the features of the website. However, if those features are not important to you, then disabling it is a good option. Here’s how to do it:
Step 1: Click on the Chrome menu at the top right corner and then click on “Show advanced settings”.
Step 2: Now click on “Content settings” below the “Privacy” heading.
Step 3: Select “Do not allow any site to run JavaScript” under the “JavaScript” heading to disable Javascript completely.
This will disable Javascript on all the websites, therefore also disable cryptocurrency mining. Ideally, you should only disable Javascript on a website that you know is crypto-mining and keep it enabled on other websites. To do so, click on “Manage exceptions” in the same “JavaScript” section and provide the URL of the website on which you want to block crypto-mining.
Use a chrome extension
With the popularity of The Pirate Bay crypto-mining issue, many crypto mining blocking extensions have emerged. And one of the most popular ones is minerBlock. The extension blocks coin mining from some of the popular crypto-mining services, such as CoinIMP. It’s also open-source (source code), so there is a good chance the list of blocked services will be updated as more services are introduced.
Just install the extension and it will automatically start blocking crypto mining. You can click on the extension button to whitelist a website if you want.
Block the crypto-mining domain in your ad blocker
If you are already using an ad blocker, then you may not have to download an extra extension. You just need to add the miner’s domain in your ad blocker’s list of blocked URLs and the mining will be blocked. I recommend using uBlock Origin for this purpose as it already blocks some of the popular crypto-miners, but you can use any other ad blocker as well.
For example, to block crypto-mining for Coinhive, you can simply paste the below URL in your ad blocker’s list of ad URLs to block.
https://coin-hive.com/lib/coinhive.min.js
To conclude
Disabling Javascript is a sure shot way to disable any type of cryptocurrency miner. However, as Javascript is crucial for the proper working of most websites, this approach has limited usage. You should get minerBlock extension as dedicated developers will be updating the extension’s list of the domain to block as soon as they emerge. Therefore, you won’t have to do the dirty work yourself.
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