The cryptocurrency world is booming and there’s a lot of money to be made there. So it should be no surprise that many website owners choose to use the computing power of their visitors’ computers to mine for cryptocurrency for themselves.
Unfortunately, many of these websites don’t let their users know about this practice and don’t offer them an option to stop it.
Even worse, in most cases, it’s difficult for a regular users to know if a website is using their computer to mine for cryptocurrency.
There are rarely changes in your browser’s performance and nothing noticeable happens when you start mining for others.
So you might be wondering how to find out if a website is using your computer to mine cryptocurrency for them. And that’s exactly what we’re going to talk about in this article!
What is cryptocurrency mining and why should you worry?
Many people think that websites that use their users’ computers to mine cryptocurrency infect them with some sort of a virus or something similar.
However, that is not really the case. Your computer is not “infected” when mining for cryptocurrency for others and simply closing the tab with the website in question will end the operation.
But why should you worry? No data is stolen from you, no bad effects are to be seen… everything runs as it should, so why should you even care about this?
Well, you should care because cryptocurrency mining is done by using your computer’s CPU. This can have direct impacts over the performance of your computer, meaning that it might run slower than usually (although it rarely happens).
However, the biggest concern is that when your computer uses more CPU, it also uses more electricity in order to do that. This means that you will end up paying more on your electricity bill.
In most cases, you won’t even feel the difference in price since it’s going to be minor, but it’s still something that you probably don’t want to do – or at least you want to know about this and have the option to turn it off.
Why do websites do this?
The short answer would be: to make money.
The time you spend mining cryptocurrency for a website translates into money for that particular blog or site.
You’re not making them a fortune, you’re probably not making them more than a few cents by mining for them. But the more visitors a website has, the more money they can generate.
For example, a large website getting 50,000 different users per day can get $150 and more worth of cryptocurrnecy mined per day by their users.
Most of the websites using this don’t have that amount of visitors and it doesn’t matter. What matters is that one user mining for a website would only generate about 3 cents per day.
Websites need money to operate and run and most users are annoyed by ads and banners and similar stuff that website owners use in order to pay the bills.
Cryptocurrency mining is not invasive and it looks like a great approach to generate money while keeping the users happy without bombarding them with ads.
A website can’t run without money and those working to deliver quality content that you find helpful, amusing or a must read for whatever reasons deserve to be paid for their work just as anybody in the world is paid for their job.
However, this doesn’t mean that you should be forced to pay out of your own pocket. Users should still be at least told that a website is mining cryptocurrency using their computer and they should have the option to either decline or stop navigating that website in order to stop mining.
But the problem is that most websites that mine cryptocurrency don’t tell you about this, so you still mine for them without being aware that you do. And this is unfair, in my opinion.
Which brings us to today’s question: how to find out if a website is mining cryptocurrency using your computer?
There are various ways to do it, some more complicated than others, but I personally recommend visiting a website.
The website in question is simply called whoismining.com and it’s basically a search engine for websites that mine (or not) cryptocurrency with your computer.
All you have to do after visiting that website is type the url of the website you want to test, hit the “Check” button and you’ll find out the results. Easy as pie!
Conclusion
It is understandable that websites need to monetize their traffic in order to survive and using their users’ computers to mine for cryptocurrencies is an unobtrusive way to achieve that.
But all websites doing so should inform their visitors about the mining process – then, it’s up for the visitor to decide if they accept or not, by closing the tab of the website they’re visiting or, even better, by simply declining this opportunity to the website in question.