The background cryptocurrency miner that The Pirate Bay was “evaluating” without user consent set off several alarms. As time passes, all parties involved will have to determine whether crypto mining can replace (or not) traditional advertising, but if you don’t agree with that, there is always the possibility to block its operation. That is where extensions like No Coin come in, compatible with Google Chrome and soon available on Firefox.
The Pirate Bay’s mining experiment
The Pirate Bay decided to clarify the situation of its miner through a brief statement. Indeed, the JavaScript script that leads to Coinhive aims to obtain Monero. The administrators want to eliminate all advertising from the index, but the fact that they need money to keep it online doesn’t change. Apparently, users felt the impact of the miner because there was a typo in the code, which unduly increased the use of processors. The idea is to take between 20 and 30 percent, and remain limited to a single tab of TPB. Despite the scandal, most answers on the announcement were positive, and it’s most likely that the strategy of “cryptocurrencies replacing ads” will continue.
No Coin, the miner blocker
However, the last word belongs to the user, and if there’s no interest in giving up CPU cycles for crypto mining, it’s recommended to install the No Coin extension. Its developer makes it clear: Monetizing content with cryptocurrencies is a good idea, but abusing it is not, therefore any session should be “opt-in”. No Coin works with a blacklist of services similar to Coinhive. The domains can be edited in the blacklist.txt file, although the best way to control the extension is simply pressing the pause button, or managing domains with a whitelisting, either temporary or permanent.
For now, No Coin is compatible with Google Chrome, but the version for Mozilla Firefox is already on its way. Alternatives to this extension are a custom JavaScript block with NoScript, or entering the domains directly in the HOSTS file.
