| I am one of such owners who did not disclose mining activities on my website and I am encouraged yet concerned at the opinions of the developers over what one does with coin-hive. It is always good to have an opinionated, and impassioned developer. But if it leads to coin-hive dictating the way a website chooses to operate, it becomes not much different from the way Adsense dictates the way you have to display its ads. This is the quote in question: "we have to be respectful to our end users". I am your end user. My visitors are my end user. Please do not jump the gun. That said, the topic of whether disclosure is respectful, or legal, or legal until the law has caught up with it is a slippery slope with many valid yet conflicting parts. - When a visitor visits a website, is there an implicit agreement to expend resources to load all of the website? - If so, is ad block breaking the implicit agreement? - Why do people often use cookies as an example of why it should be disclosed, when the issue is a matter of privacy not the use of computer resources? - If it is computer resources, doesn't it fall under the first point above? Yet, there are many types of tracking tools besides cookies that are even more invasive and take up CPU, bandwidth and electricity like tracking cursor movements (session replay) that never gets disclosed either out in the wild. It may seem like the whole world is against undisclosed mining, but to a fish, an aquarium could be the whole world. |
I think its important to notify the user that you are doing things without their explicit knowledge. Technically you are taking advantage of their system for your own monetary gain, and in fact they spend more generating that money than you receive from their efforts (by averaged data from comed's 2016 demographic census).
"When a visitor visits a website, is there an implicit agreement to expend resources to load all of the website?" I don't think that mining cryptocurrency counts as part of "loading all of the website," and I would go so far as to call that extraneous.
Cookies are actually not notified only for their privacy implications but for the fact that they store data on your device.
As a user of any website, I am fine with coinhive running as long as I am aware of it. Checking the network waterfall to see if assets from coinhive were loaded is a bad experience to check if the page might be doing something more malicious. All in all I think we end up where we began. Be kind to your users, since they are, of course, who you are catering your experience to.