Recently I've started seeing articles about Cryptotab browser again. Yup, the very browser that some say "allows you to mine Bitcoin on your laptop".

Quite some time ago I've already made an article about Cryptotab (or more exactly, about three then-hyped "browsers", and Cryptotab was one of them).

I thought Cryptotab shit died long ago but upon seeing new hyping articles I understood that the amount of noob wannabe "miners" surpasses my estimations by far.

Ok, I have something to say to those miners.

As I said in my old article, Cryptotab is nothing more than yet another theme park with blackjack and hookers. Well, a Chromium clone with a build-in XMR miner and a referral system attached.

Monero (XMR) is a "privacy-oriented" crypto coin. At the moment it runs on a PoW mineable algorithm called RandomX. RandomX is an "ASIC-resistant" algo, designed and improved so that to make its coins mineable on CPU primarily. In other words, there's no ASICs to run RandomX, and buying even the most powerful GPU will not benefit your hashrate a lot. I will not go into detail on why it's done so. I can only tell that it's done this way not in order to let every wannabe "miner" quickly make a shitload of money on his shitty laptop.

To begin with, to mine XMR and to exchange it to BTC or anything, you don't need Cryptotab or any similar shit. You need a "miner" (a piece of software which actually does "mining", there's quite a few of them for free or for a "dev-fee"), an XMR pool to mine at, and an account at a crypto-exchange to swap Monero to any other shit. Yes, with proper settings you can "surf and mine" at the same time -- if you want more to surf than to mine.

Technically, XMR can be mined on CPU. Well, technically, BTC can also be mined on CPU -- but practically mining BTC on CPU is useless since any of today's CPU is too weak to mine even a single satoshi. And the same is true for XMR to some extend. PoW mining requires "computational power", the more you want to mine out -- the more "computational power" you need. And higher "computational power" comes together with higher electricity consumption (which in turn comes together with higher cooling requirements) -- there's no way around, no CPU can work on thin air (it's a bit oversimplified, but I know about SIMD, etc). At some point electricity costs may go greater than mining "earnings".

The first thing any wannabe miner must do is to call his electricity provider to learn power tariffs and to spend 10 bucks for a thing called "wattmeter". It may well happen that after leaning the tariffs, plugging the PC into the said wattmeter, and making some math the real "mining earnings" become negative. PoW mining is good when you have some "free" (i.e. paid by someone else, and preferably not by your parents) electricity (and preferably, "free" hardware too).

Don't be lured by sayings like "When I surf, my laptop eats electricity anyway, no matter if I mine then or not". Better plug the said wattmeter in and do some math. First, when you surf and mine at the same time, you put your CPU on the edge, but your surfing slows your mining (or vice versa), and as a result, you have neither smooth surfing nor good mining while wasting electricity. But the funniest thing is that when you're only surfing, your CPU mainly sleeps... Yup, the humans are so much slowlier than silicon chips, that your CPU has enough time to sleep between mouse clicks. But it's not so with mining -- the good "miner" software is pretty much fast and it can rape your CPU every nanosecond (that's actually exactly what a good "miner" is made for). Shortly, there's no "unused resources" in your PC that can be utilized for mining. Utilizing "sleep" for mining costs additional power consumption and latency. Not utilizing it means you don't mine anything. In other words, here it's hard to have a cake and eat it too.

Unfortunately, laptop manufacturers design their things for working with humans, not with the mining programs. Neither power system nor cooling system, no other system in a laptop is designed to work 24/7, especially under stressful conditions. However today it's hard to "burn" a CPU (it has a pretty good overheating protection built in), it's still possible to break a little Chinese fan in the cooling system -- and to spend all the "mining earnings" to have it repaired in a service center.

"So you mean it's not possible to earn BTC with Cryptotab?", you might ask. Well, it's indeed possible to earn BTC with Cryptotab if:

• you're ready to call "earnings" the pennies you see in Cryptotab's dashboard after your "laptop and smartphone mining" -- hopefully BTC will become $100M someday and every satoshi will count then; or
• you have a lot of "free" electricity (dozens of KW/h) or hardware (dozens of PCs), or preferably both, to run hundreds of Cryptotab instances; or
• you have a shitload (hundreds or thousands) of Cryptotab referrals under you.

The last point is the most interesting. Cryptotab has a 10-level affiliate system. That is, you earn something not only from your direct refs (the guys who signed under your link), but also from the refs of the refs of the refs of the refs of the refs of the refs of the refs of the refs of the refs of your refs! You can actually earn more from pushing this shit all around, than from doing "Cryptotab mining".

Why? The guys behind Cryptotab probably have a small cut in hashrate, maybe 1%, 0.1% or even 0.01% (that is they use 0.01% of the hashrate to mine XMR for themselves). And when we talk about thousands or millions of running Cryptotab instances, 0.01% of total hashrate is not so small. Besides, the guys might have a small cut in XMR/BTC conversions. And again, it's not so small if we talk about revenues from thousands or millions of running instances.

What Cryptotab guys are trying to do is to build a so-called "botnet". You probably heard about "mining botnets" when bad guys push mining malware into innocent PCs. But Cryptotab guys are really smart, they're not doing anything illegal, their users install mining shit completely at will! If only the guys have told their users the whole truth...

Anyway, no one is obliged to trust me. Anyone is completely free to go install Cryptotab (even under my own affiliate link) to earn BTC and prove me wrong. Just plug that fucking wattmeter in first...

I'm often accused of "negative attitude" for raining on someone's parade. Well, I don't think I must praise any shit only because it happened to exist on the internets. However, I must agree that running Cryptotab is by far less financially risky than investing thousands of $$$ into some unknown shitcoin's ICO. But I'd say that if I'd found a shilled shitcoin's ICO, my attitude would be much more negative.

BTW, not so long ago I made an article on affiliate ethics. Well, whatever, nevermind.

Disclaimer: No joking, I really mean to leave it for good, unless you don't mind to dupe a hundred or two of your refs.

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