Is it possible to earn money with mining by surfing the web?

Browsing the web often takes up a lot of our time, and there are those who would like to “invest” that time to earn from cryptocurrency mining, for example. 

Earn money with web mining

Actually, mining has nothing to do with time because instead, it is a real job of extracting and calculating cryptographic codes, but there is a browser extension that can do mining while we are using the browser itself to browse the web. 

Therefore, it is an add-on that adds the functionality to the browser to extract cryptocurrencies that are sent to a mining pool that uses them to try to mine cryptocurrencies. 

Lately, the most well-known of these add-ons, CryptoTab, has also released its own browser that you can use as an alternative to those already commonly used. 

Limitations to web mining

So it is possible to mine cryptocurrencies with your browser while browsing the web, but there are two important limitations. 

The first one is due to energy consumption. Mining cryptographic hashes only work if huge amounts of them are mined, and this mining work inevitably produces significant additional power consumption. 

So the electricity consumed by the add-on is not the one normally used by the browser, but it is added to it and significantly increases the total consumption. 

However, those who have access to low-cost, or even free, electricity can ignore this limitation, which is crucial for anyone who does not have low-cost electricity. 

The second limitation instead concerns the computing power used. In fact, mining revenues depend proportionally on the computing power you can use to extract cryptographic hashes. 

From this point of view, it must be made clear that any standard computer, or smartphone, does not even remotely have the computing power needed to mine Bitcoin. 

Suffice it to say that one of the standard devices to mine Bitcoin, the Antminer S19 XP of Bitmain, has a computing power of 140TH/s, which translates into 140 trillion hashes extracted every single second. A normal computer doesn’t even reach a millionth of this power, resulting ineffective in the attempt to mine Bitcoin. 

The situation is different for other cryptocurrencies, such as Monero (XMR), which can be mined even with lower computing power. Despite this, however, the revenue produced by mining with standard computers or smartphones is negligible, if not insignificant. 

However, it must be said that software that allows you to mine while surfing often pays users back in BTC, even though they may be mining XMR because, for the average user, Bitcoin is easier to use than Monero. 

When the software sends the hashes to the mining pool, in the event that you manage to validate a block by cashing in the premium, it is the mining pool that cashes it in, not the user. Then it will be up to the managers of the mining pool to distribute the takings to all participants in proportion to the amount of hash they have extracted. 

In addition to energy consumption, however, there is another disadvantage: the slowdown in the device’s performance in use. In fact, the extraction of the hashes requires a lot of computing power, which the device cannot use for other purposes. If you don’t have a particularly powerful device, the slowdown can be significant, while with particularly powerful devices, the slowdown may not be appreciable if you just browse the web while mining.