Trying out JSE Coin mining: micro test

I'm pretty irritated by web-miners. That is, by platforms that provide a cryptocurrency miners a webmaster can put on their sites and make your browser burn power for their profit.

Fortunatelly, they are not very popular right now, but will be in the future, that's pretty obvious, it will be the same just like advertising flooded the internet years ago. Where's an option for reaping some money multiplied by the number of the masses passing by, there will be some opportunists that wil try to max their profit out of that. Right now the sheer amount of current advertisements irritates, the ads are everywhere on the internet, street, building's walls, billboards, my postbox, and so on and on. I am sure that web-crypto-miners will bloom soon.

Then, today, I've read about this post on JSECoin and it caught enough of my interest to register and try out their miner (available on https://platform.jsecoin.com/)

I'm positively surprised that even on max "acceleration: 9" it actually limits itself to about 10-20% CPU usage.

Also, what's not really advertised (or I missed it somehow when I was reading their summaries and intros), the miner seems to work only when the website that hosts it is on the foreground. If I change browser tabs to view something else, the miner immediately stops. Very nice!

This ensures that mining is proportional to screen time (money goes to what I read right now, not what I just pinned to see later) and also that I won't ever have 80 tabs that silently mine in the background. That looks very good, much better than other contemporary mine-instead-of-ads solutions!

Of course, that does not guarantee that this policy will be held forever. Some simple options like throttling or keeping track if we're still on-screen are very easy to reconfigure, and if the designers of the platform allow webmasters to adjust them, it will fall flat on its face again as greedy advertisement operators will simply turn that checks off.

However, for now, LGTM:

Now, some stats. The title said "mining micro test", right? :)

While I was writing this, I ran that miner. I kept it on separate window on separate screen to make sure it won't get defocused/etc. It kept running for something close to last 30 minutes, I had no other CPU-intensive tasks in the meantime.

The chart was totaly flat for that time (that small hole is when I made this screenshot):

Machine stats from Chrome worker process that hosted the miner (reported by ProcessHacker2):

Hardware:

• Win10 Home
• Intel i7-55500U 2.40GHz, 4 logical cores
• 16.0 GB RAM

Outcome after ~0.5H:

• reported hashrate: 12kH/s
• hashes found: 90
• earnings: 3 JSE

JSE's ICO sells 81000 JSE for 1 ETH, so I've got something like 0.000037037 ETH.
Right now, ETH stands for 275.75 USD (https://currencio.co/eth/usd/1/) so that's $0.0102 for 0.5h or $0.490 per 24h.
On one one 'visitor' computer.

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Small update:

I forgot to write one important thing: the site reported that "number of currently active self-miners" is around 4400. That value linearly impacts the chance to mine a coin, so if there's 8800 you will get only half of the coins, and 2200 means double the coins income I observe right now. At the time of the test the value oscillates between 4350 and 4400.

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Small update 2:

The miner also seems to work on low-priority threads. When I was building some 120+ component project in VisualStudio (pretty CPU intensive job at times), the miner seemed to yield the CPU. Nothing other has changed than my usage of the machine - the miner's website tab was still open on the same monitor, still was on 100% on-screen, etc.

:

Btw. it's now 2H of running,

Outcome after ~2.0H:

• reported hashrate: 12kH/s (kept mostly around 90-100% of that, minor fluctuations)
• hashes found: 305
• earnings: 7 JSE

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Small update 3:

Outcome after ~5.0H:

• reported hashrate: 12kH/s (kept mostly around 90-100% of that, minor fluctuations)
• hashes found: 714
• earnings: 12 JSE
• number of active miners: around 4370

Calculating again:
JSE's ICO sells 81000 JSE for 1 ETH, so I've got something like 0.000148148 ETH.
Right now, ETH stands for 275.75 USD (https://currencio.co/eth/usd/1/) so that's $0.040851 for 5.0h or $0.196 per 24h.

At this point I end the mining and measurement, no more content updates.

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Time for a summary!

The end result fell quite far from initial quick check (144 JSE/24h ~= $0.49 vs final 57.6 JSE/24h ~= $0.196), but not bad taking into consideration I'm mining at laptop with something like 20% CPU used. While profit calculation takes ICO<>ETH conversion rates, and therefore the dollar amount cannot be taken seriously, then 12 JSE mined after 5hrs of 1 vistor's screen-time at hashrateacceleration=9 (effective 12kH/s) and ~4400 miners in the pool may be considered to be pretty much reliable measurement.

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