Coinhive To Shut Down Mining Operations In March

Cryptocurrency mining service Coinhive has announced it will discontinue its mining operation services as a result of a recent Monero (XRM) hard fork, which caused a hash rate drop of over 50 percent for the Monero network. According to the announcement, operations will cease in just over a week on March 8.

ETHNews reported on Coinhive's XRM mining software in September 2017 when two streaming websites, showtime.com and showtimeanytime.com, claimed their sites had been modified by the mining company's code to include a JavaScript code that hijacked visitors' web browsers to mine XRM. Dubbed "malvertising," the Coinhive code consumed up to 60 percent of the affected users' CPU processing power while mining. The operation stopped as soon as the visitor navigated away from the affected pages.

There were websites, however, that knowingly deployed Coinhive's mining software. In February 2018, the news and opinion site Salon decided that, in lieu of advertisements, readers would be able to choose whether or not they wanted to run Coinhive's software to mine XRM for the site. A few months later, in April 2018, UNICEF Australia also began using Coinhive's mining software. As part of the HopePage charity, users could visit the site and "donate" their computing power to mine XRM. Coinhive developed a newer version of its code for UNICEF Australia called AuthedMine. The updated software explicitly asked users to opt into using the program and allowed them to choose how much computing power was being used.

The XRM mined using Coinhive's services is paid out every second hour, twelve times a day. The operation pays its users "per solved hash. The payout rate is adjusted automatically every few hours based on the global difficulty of the network and the average reward per block." Coinhive then distributes 70 percent of the XRM earned to its miners who have mined the minimum payout threshold of .02 XRM.

Although the mining software will not be operable after March 8, Coinhive has stated that users who have an account with the company will be able to cash out until April 30, as long as their total balance is above the minimum payout threshold.