What Is the Monero Mining Faucet?

Very few people actively operate cryptocurrency faucets these days. That isn’t just because the rewards are pretty small, but also that such projects mainly rely on donations from the community. Things are different in the Monero camp, as someone has come up with a decent use case for the Coin Hive script. The Monero Mining Faucet allows anyone to mine XMR through a browser for their own purposes. It is an interesting way of promoting Monero for the right reasons.

The Monero Mining Faucet Embraces In-Browser Mining

Half a dozen stories involving nefarious Monero mining scripts have surfaced on the internet over these past few weeks. In virtually every case, a website embedded the Coin Hive mining script to generate XMR on behalf of site operators or criminals. While The Pirate Bay experimented with this tool for legitimate purposes, someone embedded it in two CBS websites not long ago. It is evident this “business model” receives overwhelmingly negative attention these days, but that is only to be expected given these attacks.

Thankfully, there may be a small light at the end of this unexpectedly dark tunnel. One Monero community member has found a legitimate use case for the Coin Hive script which will promote the benefits of Monero mining to more people. More specifically, the Monero Mining Faucet has been created to let anyone mine XMR using a wallet linked to their browser session. This effectively allows people to mine XMR without having to set up anything and without downloading additional software.

As one would expect, this venture allows people to mine Monero using their CPU. It does not appear GPU mining is enabled right now, although that may be done on purpose. This mining faucet allows everyone in the world to mine marginal amounts of XMR with the hardware at their disposal. Every computer has a CPU, but a lot of devices only have onboard graphics cards, which are not all that powerful.

Even though this Monero mining faucet makes mining XMR a lot easier, it should only be used when one has access to free electricity. No one who mines at home will receive any significant amount of XMR by using this website whatsoever. Then again, that was never the purpose of this particular project, which is only to be expected. It is not designed to replace traditional mining either, mind you. It is merely a solution to let people earn some XMR rather than rely on more traditional faucets which pay next to nothing.

What makes this project so appealing is its low payout threshold. Users can request smaller payouts – on the same level as traditional payouts – to receive their XMR pretty quickly. Getting small amounts of XMR into the hands of as many people as people is the number-one priority of this project. Additionally, it is worth mentioning that the developers are not making any profit whatsoever. Any money generated from the site goes back directly to the users. There was never a plan or intent to make money from this site, nor should there be.

However, if people do generate a small amount of XMR and leave their balance untouched for a month, the XMR will be reclaimed by the developers. This is not designed to make anybody rich, though, but it will make it slightly easier to create a small pool of spare funds to process payouts even faster. All things considered, this is a very interesting idea and one that may revitalize the concept of cryptocurrency faucets altogether.