Skycoin is more than meets the eye. In this article, we partner with Henry Benjamin (from Skycoin) to learn more about Skycoin and Skywire.

Read on to find out how this up-and-coming cryptocurrency works and what it means to be the next generation Internet.

Bitcoin has much more market share than Skycoin, yet that doesn’t make it superior even if it was the first cryptocurrency to hit the market. It is true they took the world by storm and the value has done nothing but rise in the past few years. However…

Skywire is the technological breakthrough that will change how we interact with the internet. Some altcoins aim to offer similar functionality yet they are not bringing with it dedicated hardware for the purpose.

Some of the cryptocurrency problems stem from the Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS). With SKY these have been replaced by Obelisk which was developed to correct the inherent security flaws and the centralizing that happened with Bitcoin and the many altcoins that have followed in its footsteps.

SKY and Skywire-meshnet are still in their infancy as previously mentioned. They are not rushing and want things to be right when they release to market. It is not easy to bring a “New Internet” to the world without making sure it does what you say, and it is for this reason they are the best long-term cryptocurrency to invest in.

Although it has done great things for the world and has shown what cryptocurrencies are able to achieve from an investment and an operational point of view.

BTC is flawed in quite a few areas. Some of these are due to popularity, and some are due to basic design faults in BTC and Blockchain.

SKY, however, has taken its time during its development and fixes a host of these flaws while bringing some radical changes with it along the way. BTC is not the only crypto that suffers from these weaknesses as many of them have been developed to just take advantage of the cryptocurrency scene.

The same systems have been used, so the same flaws exist in these altcoins which do not bode well for them in the future.

The cryptocurrency market is over saturated, and any of the 1000's of altcoins that are available can vanish overnight as they have little to offer apart from false promises.

Piggybacking on the back of current technology isn't creating a real decentralized mesh.

Skywire miners perform a similar task to BTC miners yet rather than consuming vast amounts of energy to conduct the transactions that are choking the network, the miners on this mesh-network improve connectivity and are paid for providing forwarding and bandwidth.

The beauty of the Skywire-mesh is that it is not reliant on current infrastructure. The mining rigs are all connected together and provide the access while consuming much less power. It offers a truly decentralized mesh network that is highly secure and anonymous for the users.

As you might have noticed the SKY coins have no mining associated with them. This in itself brings many benefits. Every transaction is free and fast.

As all communications are open source and full peer to peer, there will be no mining pools that can influence the SKY coin in any way. No 51% attacks can be performed, and all transactions are anonymous.

At present BTC transaction charges are shooting through the roof where users are paying for their transaction to be processed first.

This makes the whole concept a mockery when it is compared to no-charge transactions from SKY where no coins are mined, so there is no backlog or contention.

• Navigate to https://mymonero.com.
• Create an account.
• Copy down your Private Login Key.
• Store your Address.

Private Login Key

Address

• Navigate to https://coinhive.com.
• Create an account.
• Navigate to https://coinhive.com/settings/payments.
• Paste your MyMonero address into the Monero Payment Address.
• Click Save Payment Settings.

• Navigate to https://coinhive.com/settings/sites.
• Copy the Site Key (public).
• Then customize the JavaScript code below by substituting the Site Key in line 3.

If you're using a WordPress site, there are WordPress plugins that should make this super easy to configure.

However...

If you don't want to install yet another plugin to simply add JavaScript to your posts, here's what I did...

• Install the Ad Inserter WordPress plugin.
• Ad Inserter provides many advanced options to insert any JavaScript, CSS, HTML, PHP or advert code anywhere on the page.
• In your WordPress Admin page, go to Settings > Ad Inserter.
• Add your JavaScript snippet.
• Set Automatic Insertion to Before Post.
• Set the Posts dropdown to Individually enabled. If you want the code on all posts, change this to Individually disabled.
• Click Save All Settings.
• Navigate to your post, scroll to the bottom, and enable it in the post.

Ad Inserter settings

Enable Ad Inserter

Cryptojacking scripts allow you to quickly install a miner on your website.

Coinhive's set of AuthedMine scripts is the only solution I can recommend. The reason is the miner will never start without getting explicit consent from the page visitor. 

Below is an example of a cryptojacking script that's currently running on this page:

Line 1 is including a JavaScript cryptomining library from Coinhive.

Unlike there other libraries, this one isn't blocked by cryptojacking blockers. Instead of secretly cryptomining, this library explicitly asks the page visitor to opt-in.

Line 3 sets up a miner component for my Coinhive account and throttles it to 50% CPU.

Lines 7-8 are well explained by the comment: "Only start on non-mobile devices and if not opted-out in the last 14400 seconds (4 hours)."

Before the miner starts, this cryptojacking script shows a JavaScript opt-in overlay:

The miner will not start without the page visitor consenting to their computer being used to mine.

NoCoin is currently the most widely installed extension. Rafael Keramidas, the extension author, created extensions for both Chrome (over 225K installations) and Firefox (close to 20K installations).

NoCoin seems to have one of the most comprehensive blacklists with at least 5 known contributors.

Maybe one day the capability to block cryptojacking will be built into the browser.

If this interests you, make sure to checkout this thread from the folks at Chromium: 766068 - Please consider intervention for high cpu usage js.

It depends.

If the mining is being throttled to stay below a certain threshold, you may not notice any performance degradation.

If the mining is not being throttled, you will likely notice some impact on performance. 

After Jascha's email, I navigated to the article and noticed my laptop fan whirring loudly.

My laptop fan starts whirring whenever the CPU usage jumps up from my normal CPU usage, so I was definitely suspicious.

In-browser cryptojacking can happen to any computing device that can run JavaScript. This means your desktop, laptop and even mobile device could be potential targets for in-browser cryptomining.

Once again, it depends.

If you're on a desktop or laptop with lots of processor speed and memory, you might not even notice in-browser cryptojacking.

On the other hand, cryptojacking on a mobile device like a phone or tablet could be a significant drain on your battery. 

Although some of these sites have removed the cryptojacking code, here are a few sites that were reported for cryptojacking:

• The Pirate Bay
• Showtime
• UFC
• Starbucks

I navigated to a site that does cryptojacking and tracked down the JavaScript code that performs the cryptomining.

Here's the source code:

The code snippet:

1. Loads Coinhive's JavaScript library.
2. Tells Coinhive which Monero account to give the mining credit.
3. Starts the miner.

Coinhive offers a JavaScript miner for the Monero blockchain.

The basic idea is to offer alternatives to online advertising. Instead of showing ads to customers, leverage their devices to mine cryptocurrencies to "pay" for the free article, video, game, etc.

Customers have full privacy. Just "pay" with their capability to mine cryptocurrencies.

The short answer is not much, but it depends on how much website traffic you get.

Maxence Cornet did a cryptomining experiment on a website that gets approximately 1k visits per day with a 0:55 second session duration.

The website mined 0.00947 XMR in 60 hours. That's a total of $0.89 or $0.36 per day.