Recently, the famous torrent website, The Pirate Bay, was using a script embedded in the coding of the website to use visitors CPU usage as a way for the website to mine cryptocurrency.
The script that they used was called Coinhive which will help the website earn small amounts of cryptocurrency called Monero, it does not earn them much of the currency but if you are the most popular torrent website in the world and have thousands of visitors every day that could total up to a large amount. Opera is taking things into their own hands by releasing an update that will block cryptocurrency scripts that websites might have. It works similar to an adblocker where a server has information of all the ads and the program will cross-reference elements in a website and if its part of an ad, it will not be shown.
Coinhive is not to blame, if you visit their website, they specifically mentioned that if you are going to use the script, you should take the due diligence to inform your visitors that you are using a cryptojacking script to make some money. Perhaps it’s a good time to give Opera a use, especially for those of you that don’t have powerful computers, will definitely benefit from this.
