Stop coin mining in the browser with No Coin
I recently stumbled across an interesting service while browsing HackerNews. Named Coinhive, it provides you with a way to let visitors of your website mine coins for you using their computer resources. I fell in love with the idea, what a great alternative to ads for monetizing content.
Coinhive gives you with a short link service where the user mines before being redirect, a Captcha that requires some mining as proof of work and an API that lets you hook up it up to whatever you want. Making your users work occasionally for short amount of time during their browsing session is a great use of the service.
But the fear of some sites abusing the service to mine during the entire browsing session quickly crossed my mind and was unfortunately rapidly confirmed. A friend of mine sent me a link about The Pirate Bay doing exactly this and I have read reports about other sites doing so too. It is an unfair use of your resources and as a user you should have the choice to opt-in or at least opt-out from it. And that is when No Coin was born.
No Coin is a small browser extension I built during a special Stream yesterday. It was quickly written and for now only supports enabling and disabling a list of blacklisted browser coin mining services. But rest assured, there are plans to allow white listing of domains and other improvements such as the UI. The goal is to have an “adblock for coin miners” with an updated list of those services that might grow in the future.
You can find No Coin there:
Don’t hesitate to submit PRs and add issues!
Update:
NoCoin was featured in the press. You can find articles on the following sites: