Thoughts after mining Monero for three days

@bulletbill22 no u can't use flash on 2026. instead use HTML5

@fantuan not that you'll hit it big, but you might do better leaving it running, as opposed to intermittently. I leave my miners on non-stop. Sometimes it will be days without a payout, sometimes I get multiple in the same day.

@UsualCat
I understand and yes I've seen those PoW captchas on brave browser.
After some research (deepseek) about browser mining, I found that it was a big thing in 2017-2018 with 'Coinhive'. However its since been cracked down on by browsers themselves, security software and even adblockers. The defenses work by scanning for blacklisted code signatures, and by monitoring potential abuse of resources.
Besides, I doubt this method would achieve the scale necessary to be competitive these days. The hashrate (and difficultly) is much higher than its ever been(1). I think the real miners are the ones hacking into edge computing datacenters.

(1) Hashrate: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/monero-hashrate.html#alltime

@Nebuchadnezzar_II i mean if you asking whether it will get the hashpower it need for profit, yeah.
it can.
if you can bring me 100 devices or 1000 devices even if its low end. i sure i can even get some profit from it
for hacking datacenter its harder than being said. i mean if i said i had newest homeserver with karnel 7. you will had hard time to hack into it. let alone install something, people who own it will realize the usage spike almost all the time while the actual usage should be lower

datacenter nowdays had complicated log that can tell when high, and low usage. so, the only way ppl having alot botnet or mining bot on my opinion is just hacking the workplace, where they had cluster of computer on each room.

i will not mention which country but on my country, back then people doing it for btc. i know him from facebook group..... that's was nasty but at that time... its wild to know they earn money from nothing (welp not really nothing, his company paying for him)

@UsualCat Maybe you're right. It would be interesting to know what types of botnets really make up the hashrate in 2026, but it would be impossible to measure with any certainty.

You're probably right that its workplaces with lots of computers running that are the best target for botnets, and that data centers are much more security hardened.

Conversely, in future, data centers could become the main target because there could be many more of them deployed in every town and along every road, even in space. Even a small data center would probably control way more compute than a workplace, so you could fly under the radar by using a much smaller CPU/ electricity footprint relative to the size of the operation, and still have room to profit.

They're stealing electricity really. That's the crime and crux of the economics of it.

@Nebuchadnezzar_II somehow the real "deal" seems on solar panel
sadly little to no people sharing about it, lastest ones ppl running "greenhouse" with solar panel and its almost little to no info about it

(i really sure it almost 99% profitable til the point people doesn't want to share and compete)
planned to build ones on this end of the year but somehow the ram/disk price spike, so can't allocate enough of it for the controller side

@Nebuchadnezzar_II Actually, from a computing science , browser mining is not difficult to understand. This property is called "Turing completeness." Simply put, any turing-complete system can simulate any other turing-complete system. More concretely, as long as a few basic instructions can be implemented, given infinite storage, any turing-complete computer can simulate anything any other computer can do: given infinite time and storage. And JavaScript has long been capable of fully achieving this. One instance is running a complete Linux system of another architecture in the browser using JS: https://s-macke.github.io/jor1k/demos/main.html . Other, more fascinating examples are the computers simulated by obsessive Minecraft redstone player: in theory, if their redstone "computers" had infinitely expandable storage units, they could boot a Windows 11 system within 100 years.

Furthermore, @bulletbill22 browser mining has long been infeasible with the RandomX algorithm. There is now a newer web technology called WebAssembly, which can compile C/C++ programs into bytecode that runs in the browser via a dedicated "runtime," executing much closer to native program performance. Even without deliberate obfuscation, this bytecode is nearly impossible for any browser extension to detect as malicious behavior (scripts cannot perform a complete memory analysis on programs that run faster than the scripts themselves). While their paper performance figures look decent and they cannot be easily blocked, there is a serious problem: their memory I/O performance is abysmal. There is a Linux virtual machine implemented in WASM: https://copy.sh/v86/ if you try performing file I/O or memory copy operations inside these VMs, you'll find that memory bandwidth loss exceeds 98%, and latency increases by dozens of times. In a mining algorithm like RandomX, which is highly dependent on extremely low cache latency and large memory read/write throughput, browser mining is essentially suicidal. theoretically speaking, exploiting specific vulnerabilities in certain older browser versions to implant Trojans is far more cost-effective.

@UsualCat An counterintuitive fact is that modern antivirus software actually doesn't do any scanning or analysis of malware anymore. In the past, antivirus software was effective because hacker techniques were relatively crude and methods were primitive. For example, when I frequented hacker forums, many hackers used one-click tools distributed within the forum to carry out malicious activities. Those software packages were developed very rudimentarily, using VC6.0 frameworks and MFC features, and malware could analyze and identify the behaviors of these trojans.

Today, trojan technology has reached a point where no antivirus software can identify it: trojan traffic is now hidden within ping requests, DNS queries, and even CDN webpage traffic (no plaintext DNS, no SNI, antivirus software can't even determine which domain is being accessed). Obfuscation techniques have escalated to shocking degrees: there are now miniature virtual machine obfuscation technologies that interpret and execute trojans inside child VMs.

Antivirus software has completely give up virus killing. They now only do two things: First, they check whether Windows enterprise certificates are present. Microsoft now enforces this system-wide : unsigned software is treated as risky by default. Second, they check if a file's hash exists in a database of "widely known" reported trojans. Meaning, by the time antivirus software recognizes and blocks it, numerous users have already been infected and reported.

The reason your Monero wallet is being blocked is most likely due to lacking an enterprise certificate and being widely reported. A hacker can easily purchase certificates in bulk for $10 each. By the time their hashes get reported and recorded, there could already be hundreds of thousands, even millions, of victims.

@GlitchFrame agree. i mean let alone viruses, if you know cheat its wild cheating game rn.... i myself been trying apex cheat with AI. does it get ban? no....

the how anti cheat works and ai aimbot with yolo engine. its bypass entire cheat detection... we literally take the screen output, "scan it" with yolo with the finetuned models, and done....
how about movement? mouse movement? just use logitech app exploit (dont ask me which ones)

then you had 10000% legit cheat, without ever touching game resource or scanning the memory.
want other better than that? inject the cheat on karnel level.
while the app running as program, the cheat running as karnel.

if we already take a note about booth of that "cheat"
the trojan or viruses who almost always more complicated from cheat.... will had more sophisticated method bypassing the anti virus. but regardless, all of them was cat-mouse game

other side always search for the upperhand... ofc cheat that made 2016 is more simpler than current day
trojan? malware? also follow the same pattern, still remember back when i was highschooler. you can make some keylogger - remote upload to your hosting/vps/endpoint
just by attaching flashdisk on computer.... they will run it themself, need 5 second or less and you can unplug the flashdisk....

back then the most peak was auto like facebook bot
all we need to do is just attach the cookies and session grabber to as many computer as we can. spread it and let it gather the data
then next step is just made simple program in C to run those "session and cookies" from dump list and run the auto like.... back then antivirus on pc almost more than 2 (atleast on my country normally they had 3)
and no single antivirus can detect our prorgram xD peak storyline for sure while we still highschool back then lol

(ofc dont do that, hacking, stealing, etc is bad, immoral, and straight illegal. i do that back then just because lack of brainpower to understand that for sure lol)