It seems like every day lately there’s a new story about bitcoin breaking records. Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, in which the value is generated based off mathematical cryptography, and not a central state. Cryptocurrency was first introduced to be traded among retailers but seeing it’s development in the past few years has attracted some big mainstream firms. Goldman Sachs Group Inc., one of Wall Street’s biggest firms, is setting up a trading desk to make markets in digital currencies such as bitcoin. While Bitcoin has been making the headlines, there are multiple other cryptocurrencies out there, which have also been exploding in value lately. One of which is monero. What makes monero interesting is the process in which it can be mined. One of which is a browser-based implementation known as coin hive. This means that users visiting your site (After a polite opt-in message) are able to generate this cryptocurrency for you!
COINHIVE
Coinhive is a software that allows you to monetize your site by taking advantage of your visitors computing power. When visitors view your site, you can ask them to help support you by running the coin hive scripts. These scripts will run on the users machines, and by solving hashes (difficult math problems your CPU can solve), you are rewarded with some monero tokens.
HOW TO INSTALL
Follow these steps to start monetizing your website through visitors. Basically, you’ll need to add a code, generated through Coinhive, in the back end of your site in order to set it up for monetizing using Cryptocurrency.
Note* these steps require you to have basic knowledge of HTML and website back-end.
- Sign up on coinhive
- Viewing the documentation in the dashboard, you’ll be presented with a multitude of ways you can implement coin hive. I recommend using Javascript Miner
- There is a code found on the Javascript Miner page which can be added to your site. Following is an example of how it should look.
<script src=”https://authedmine.com/lib/authedmine.min.js”></script>
<script>
var miner = new CoinHive.Anonymous(‘YOUR_SITE_KEY’, {throttle: 0.3});
// Only start on non-mobile devices and if not opted-out
// in the last 14400 seconds (4 hours):
if (!miner.isMobile() && !miner.didOptOut(14400)) {
miner.start();
}
</script>
The site key (public) can be found on the settings page in the back-end of your site. Simply adding this to your site will allow you to start generating monero tokens from your users.
Coinhive claims “With just 10–20 active miners on your site, you can expect monthly revenue of about 0.3 XMR (~$91).”
At the time of writing, 1 monero token is valued just shy of $400.
CONCLUSION
With an extendable API, it seems like there are many ways that you can harness the power of your users to monetize your business. If you need help implementing new, exciting ideas on your site, feel free to contact us at [email protected]
