Browser Mining vs ASIC Mining: A History
Between 2017 and 2019, “Bitcoin mining” sometimes meant a script running quietly in your browser tab. That era is over — but it’s worth understanding why, because the same economic logic that killed browser mining is what makes ASIC hardware the only serious answer today.
The CoinHive era
In September 2017 a small team launched CoinHive, a JavaScript library that let any website embed a Monero miner. Drop the script onto your site, and visitors’ CPUs would mine Monero (algorithm: Cryptonight) while they read. The pitch was elegant: a frictionless alternative to ads. Pirate Bay tested it. UNICEF Australia experimented with a charity version. Hundreds of smaller sites — including this domain’s previous owner — wired it up as a passive monetisation experiment.
Cryptonight was deliberately CPU-friendly. Where Bitcoin’s SHA-256 algorithm rewarded specialised hardware, Cryptonight resisted ASIC dominance and ran fine on the Intel and AMD chips already sitting in every browser. That accessibility made browser mining possible at all.
Why browser mining died
Three forces killed it, more or less simultaneously:
1. The math never worked. A typical desktop CPU produces a few hundred hashes per second on Cryptonight. The Monero network at the time was running tens of millions of hashes per second across dedicated rigs. A site with 10,000 monthly visitors, each lingering 90 seconds, generated maybe a few cents of Monero per month. For the website operator the revenue was negligible; for the visitor the only effect was a hot laptop.
2. The malware reputation became unrecoverable. Cryptojacking — embedding miners without consent or hiding them in compromised sites — exploded through 2018. Antivirus vendors started flagging CoinHive’s domain. Browsers added blocklists. By the end of 2018 most major ad-blockers shipped with mining script signatures pre-loaded. Even legitimate, opt-in deployments inherited the stigma.
3. The Cryptonight algorithm got ASIC’d anyway. Bitmain shipped the Antminer X3 in early 2018: a Cryptonight ASIC that out-mined every CPU on the planet by orders of magnitude. Monero forked the algorithm to fight back, then forked again. Each fork temporarily restored CPU competitiveness, then the cat-and-mouse repeated. By 2019, anyone serious about Monero was running RandomX on dedicated hardware. Browser mining wasn’t competitive even within its own niche.
CoinHive shut down on 8 March 2019, citing the post-fork hash rate collapse and the Monero price drop that made the remaining tail unprofitable. The dependent sites — including the original coinwebmining.com — went quiet shortly after.
The rise of ASIC mining
Application-Specific Integrated Circuits don’t run JavaScript or operating systems. They do one thing — compute a specific hashing algorithm — and they do it about ten thousand times faster per watt than a general-purpose chip ever could.
For Bitcoin, the trajectory under SHA-256 has been relentless:
| Year | Reference miner | Hash rate | Efficiency (J/TH) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | Avalon Batch 1 | 0.066 TH/s | ~9,000 |
| 2016 | Antminer S9 | 13.5 TH/s | 98 |
| 2020 | Antminer S19 | 95 TH/s | 34.5 |
| 2024 | Antminer S21 | 200 TH/s | 17.5 |
| 2025 | Antminer S21 XP Hyd | 473 TH/s | 12 |
Every generation roughly doubles efficiency. That isn’t marketing — it’s the only way ASIC manufacturers can sell new units when each halving cuts mining rewards in half. The hardware has to outrun the difficulty curve, or nobody buys.
For non-Bitcoin algorithms (Kaspa, Aleo, Litecoin’s Scrypt, Ethereum Classic’s Etchash, Alephium’s Blake3), the same pattern plays out on shorter timelines. ASICs ship; GPUs and CPUs become uneconomic; the algorithm community either accepts ASIC dominance or hard-forks and the cycle restarts.
What you actually need today
If you’re approaching mining now, the equation is simpler than it looks. Three inputs decide whether your operation makes money:
- Hash rate per dollar of capex. What you pay for the rig, divided by the terahashes it produces. Lower is better.
- Joules per terahash. Efficiency. Lower is better — directly cuts your monthly electricity bill.
- Your electricity rate. $0.04/kWh and you’re competitive globally. $0.20/kWh and you’re losing money on most days regardless of the rig.
Multiply through and you get a daily profit number. Below break-even, no rig works. Above it, the question becomes how fast the rig pays itself back before the next halving compresses margins again.
A modern Antminer S21 XP (270 TH/s, 3,645 W) at $0.06/kWh produces roughly $4–6 of net profit per day at typical 2026 conditions, and pays itself back in 12–18 months. That’s the realistic shape of the industry — boring, slim-margin, capital-intensive. It is decisively not “drop a script in your browser tab and watch passive income arrive.”
Where to go from here
If you came to this page from one of the old /browser-miner/… URLs that the previous owner used to serve, here’s the honest answer: the thing you were looking for doesn’t exist as a real business model anymore. Cryptonight is dormant; CoinHive is gone; even legitimate browser-mining alternatives like CryptoTab generate fractions of a cent per device-hour.
If you’re interested in Bitcoin mining as it actually works in 2026, the next step is hardware:
- Read our Beginner’s Guide to Bitcoin Mining for the fundamentals.
- If you want to mine Bitcoin specifically, every SHA-256 miner we stock has a live profitability calculator pre-populated with its hash rate and power.
- Browse the current ASIC catalogue. Every miner is listed with hash rate, efficiency, and our 1–3% margin over distributor pricing.
The story this domain used to tell is finished. The story it tells now is simpler: physical hardware, transparent pricing, escrow on first orders. That’s what works.