You could be Mining Bitcoin without even knowing!
Adguard is a company that produces the Ad Blockers for your computers. After conducting a brief study about cryptocurrency’s actual usage, they found some pretty disturbing results if you ask me. A few quick stats and 500 million people are mining Bitcoin without even knowing. You are probably thinking to yourself, how is this even possible? Surely people who undertake in such things are well aware they are doing so. This is false and let me tell you why:
Coinhive and JSEcoin codes are the most commonly used when mining Bitcoin, known as “browser scripts”. It’s all very scientific and code-like but essentially, over 220 websites are using these scripts and targeting countries to mine Bitcoin. Here are their targets: US (18%), India (13%), Russia (12%) and Brazil (8%). People from China, Europe and South America are not far behind these numbers. What’s more astounding is these companies were making a profit of 43K in the span of about one month under AdGuard’s watch.
What I found even more mind-boggling is it’s not illegal to do this! The more ethical way might be to ask people’s permission to use their computer capabilities for their own mining purposes. I’m sure most people would simply click yes not knowing too much about the issue however, consent in my opinion, should be there.
What do you guys think? Is this actually OKAY?
The concept of browser scripts is intriguing, though it’s concerning how unaware users can be exploited.