[paulpauper]

A Monero miner is one of the more innocuous forms of malware ,compared to a C&C trojan or a keylogger. Some websites will mine monero in the background. Because it's just a js script, it's not much different than a banner ad except it's less intrusive, yet somehow 'currency miner' has more negative connotations than 'ad server'. That is the downside of decentralized mining and asic resistance is you end up with a lot of zombie miners.

[crispyporkbites]

> Because it's just a js script, it's not much different than a banner ad except it's less intrusive

Tell that to your electricity provider

[superkuh]

The same thing can be said about JS ad analytics scripts and ads. Or sites that turn the entire webpage into a JS 'web app' when it'd work fine as HTML with static images and text.

[viraptor]

Not the same thing. JS increases the usage a bit. Badly broken JS may use a lot of CPU - but the author still has the incentive to fix it. But mining is a completely different category - it's designed to peg your CPU at 100%, because that's what's profitable.

[the_why_of_y]

And what's worse, for every dollar you spend on electricity for CPU-mining, you (or, in this case, someone else) receive 5 cents worth of cryptocurrency.

[wopian]

Or to your laptop/mobile battery lives...

[irundebian]

I wonder if it makes sense to implement resource controls for websites so that users can define how many CPU cycles are allowed at the maximum which give web developers incentives to write less resource-hungry web apps.