Gridcash, a Coinhive alternative?
This post was last modified over a year ago and as such, information in it may be outdated (or the post may be outright broken).
A while ago, I have posted this review of Coinhive.
At this point in time, it has earned me 0.03335104XMR over a timespan of 4 months.
While it isn't a great amount of money, it is something.A few weeks ago, the people over at Gridcash hit me up and asked if I wanted to write a review.
I agreed with them and here we are.What is Gridcash?
Gridcash is, like the title of this post suggests, an alternative to Coinhive. They promise the following things:- No detection by anti-malware software
- Additional income for the publisher because they aren't being blocked by Adblockers
- High Quality support
- The best conditions of the referral program (at 10% - or 20% for partners)
- Low fees (80% for the publisher, 20% for them)
- The willingness to drop fees for large publishers
- API for working with the system (like games, applications, partner programs - resellers in particular)
- Daily payments on request
- Mining the most profibable coins on the market
<html lang="ru"> in their code.
So they are probably Russian.
Their site does look an awful lot like the one used over at Minergate.com, but it might be a template or something? dunnoAt the time of writing this, the current payout of Gridcoin is 0.0000347124 XMR per 1M hashes.
This is 0,0000046124 XMR per 1M hashes higher than Coinhive's 0.0000301 XMR per 1M hashes, which does make it *slightly* more appealing to use Gridcoin.net
However, only time will tell whether it makes an actual difference for a publisher.Integration of the Service
Integration of the service was a little odd. Well, maybe "odd" isn't the right word for it, it's more unusual than you would expect. They have three different ways of integrating their miner into your site" The
External asynchronous js is what I would expect, however, if you read closely, you say that this isn't recommended as they change their domains every now and then.
If you don't keep up with it, then you will lose some revenue.
This domain switching is probably how they try to circumvent Adblockers (as they generally block based on domain and keywords).
The Local js has the same Javascript code as the External asynchronous js, but this time, you host in on your own server.
I have decided to sneak a little peek in their code and I was rather surprised:
Hang on tight while we're loading this image!
It's all obfuscated!
PHP + JS.
This code requires you place a little PHP script on your website and include it like you would load a regular javascript script (this, however, is not documented on their site).
This script in term will download the miner script (in order to cache it) from http://kalipasindra.online and send it to the client.
The code that is sent to the client is also obfuscated (it's pretty much the same script as the one you'll get from the External asynchronous js), however, the PHP script doesn't seem to contain anything harmful.
- No
eval()'s - No
exec()'s - Only functional stuff
Earnings after one week
One week in and I have earned about0.0003142627XMR with an average hash rate of 22H/s which is slightly lower than my average on Coinhive (I, unfortunately, do not have the exact numbers).
However, it's not easy to say whether this has to do with the algorithm itself, the number of visitors or the rates.
Earnings after two weeks
Two weeks in and I have earned about0.0012431842XMR with an average hash rate of 33H/s.
This was slightly higher than last week, but I do wonder how this comes.
Conclusion
Is it worth switching to Gridcash? The short answer is: ProbablyI only heard of them while reaching out to me and can't seem to find a lot about them, which remains sketchy. What I do like is that they do seem to try to be more transparent to their partners but I do wonder: how much profit do they actually make of it. This has remained a thing with both Coinhive and Gridcash is that we only get to see the hashrates and how much we should earn, but not how much we actually earn. It would be nice if Gridcash added theearnings per 1M hashes in a graph as well so we can track that as well if we want.
Of course, they both work with the PPS mining system as PPLNS would be sort of odd as this would require a steady hash rate.
Their rewards do seem to be higher than Coinhive but their hash rate (from Gridcash) also seems to be lower on average but this might also be just a fluke.
A direct comparison of earnings isn't really possible, as they are just like sitting in a Rollercoaster: they go up and down all the time.One big plus-point about Gridcash is that they have more detailed statistics.
Where Coinhive only gives you the hash rate chart, the current hash rate, the total hashes and the total earnings, Gridcash decided to give you more stats.
This is really convenient if you want to track revenue in a given period to see if you are making a profit (spoiler alert: I wasn't making a profit).
I will stay with Gridcash for a while to see how it unfolds in the long run :)I haven't played around with their API just yet, but it does look like it might be interesting to look into.
It gives you pretty much all the details you also have on your dashboard, so you can easily integrate it with your applications.
If demand is there, I might even write a little library for people to easily interface with it. 
If you are interested in trying out Gridcash yourself, please do so using my referral link. It would help me out a bit and it doesn't cost you anything :)I hope you guys found this post to be helpful if you did, then definitely don't forget to check out Gridcash using my referral link and spreading around this post. But for now...[g33kout]
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