SoundExpert: a white use case of Coinhive in-browser cryptomining

Monetization of web content through cryptomining in browsers still has controversial status among web developers.

Pros:

• clear and simple concept - a visitor pays as long as she uses web resource
• nothing distracts visitor's attention from web content, in other words, she pays with computing power of her device, not with her attention
• simple and secure payouts to site owners in cryptocurrency

Cons:

• time spent on site is not always a good measure of content value
• possibility of using the technology without visitor's permission
• slowing down and accelerating deterioration of visitor's hardware

After well-known false start of Coinhive service at PirateBay where it was used without user consent, Coinhive developers offered the service version which can't be used without visitor's permission. This move in combination with negotiations with leading anti-virus and ad-blocking companies results in appearance of pure legit mining service, which can be used as a valid alternative to monetization with ads.

Coinhive is not alone. According to the recent paper of researchers from FORTH-ICS - Truth in Web Mining: Measuring the Profitability and Cost of Cryptominers as a Web Monetization Model - the market shares of main players look like follows:

From the research:

To conclude, cryptomining indeed has the potential to become a reliable alternative for some content providers, but it is not capable of replacing the current ad-driven monetization model of the web.

The main reason for the conclusion is that the current mining-driven model is less profitable than ad-driven. But those content providers who keep visitors on their web sites more than 5 minutes can benefit from the new model. Music and video come to mind first. Porn industry? There is an assumption that VHS won over Betamax due to the pornographic movie market. It looks like the porn industry has the new challenge - mining vs. advertising.

For other content providers the mining-driven model of monetization is less attractive, at least at the current state of its development. But it's not hard to imagine some open and decentralized web analysis/payment system, which will reward site owners according to actual site usage in the system's own cryptocurrency (web-time-coin). Web servers and visitors' browsers connected in p2p network could provide enough computing power for such system to work. The network will also provide web-analytics and - if openly and ethically designed - it will collect only anonymous info about visitors, so there would be no reason to block those scripts.

Today the new method of monetization is on its early stage of adoption and this is the best time for experiments. Using of in-browser mining for crowdfunding is even less explored area. The more interesting to be those first explorers. For our fundraising campaign at SoundExpert (SE) we use incentivized mining with small rewards. This scenario, explained below, was developed according to peculiarity of SE project and its audience.

We, SE team, believe that audio consumers must have their own service for sound quality assessments/measurements of various audio equipment and technologies on the market, the service that is independent from manufacturing side. Since 2001 SE maintains continuous distributed listening tests of audio codecs. Sound quality ratings of 100+ codecs were and still are computed thanks to volunteers participating in the tests - more than 10 000 to date. During the last two years a new method of audio quality benchmarking for portable players was developed and tested. It uses innovative music-based audio measurements that correlate well to sound quality estimations made by humans. All measured audio parameters for tested device are shown in one compact df-slide, which gives in-detail picture of device audio performance at a glance:

Such df-slides for different devices can be easily compared with each other and sorted according to sound quality. Df-slides of 27 portable players computed during R&D period are published here. We are thankful to people who shared their portable audio devices (30+) during this beta testing. Thanks to them we managed to develop final reliable procedure of measurements. Unfortunately, it requires that a device under test has to be with us for a few days with possibility to change its settings, firmware, operating system, etc. In other words we need those devices for testing to be bought.

As SE is made for-and-by audio consumers we launched crowdfunding campaign for purchasing popular portable players for testing. Already tested devices will be sold for the purpose of buying laboratory-grade measurement equipment, which in turn will allow testing of wide range of audio devices, not only portable players.

This fundraising campaign uses both traditional donations through PayPal and mining of cryptocurrency in browser. Visitors can propose and mine for particular portable player, which will be bought and tested when its fundraising goal is achieved. Thus, every volunteer miner has a kind of helpful reward - results of highly revealing audio measurements for device of her interest.

We designed our mining page in such a way that under no circumstances a visitor can start mining by chance or accidentally or because of inattentiveness. The mining can be started wittingly with full understanding of the goal only. This is what we call open and ethical in-browser mining. Coinhive authed miner perfectly fits the purpose. In addition it allows adjusting of comfortable payload, so a user has full control over the process. Fundraising progress bar is updated every 10 minutes getting current state with Coinhive API, so a user has up to date info about the sum already mined.

As it was said in the above mentioned research paper - current in-browser mining is not very efficient/profitable. For example, rising of $100 with mining alone will require participation of 5000 - 7000 people who will leave their desktops/notebooks mining at nights during one week. The figures are a bit scary, to say the least. Anyway, our experimental crowdfunding campaign has started. To be honest we don't know how it will go. This is the price early adopters pay, so it's OK.

soundexpert.org/mining

Your SE team.

Cover illustration by John Hain