UNICEF Australia to Allow Donation Through Webmining

UNICEF Australia is helping to pioneer a new advertising and donation revenue stream by allowing users to donate their computational power and mine cryptocurrency through their browsers.

The United Nations program announced on April 29th the launch of a new website called TheHopePage that enables users to donate by using a web miner, easily and transparently mining cryptocurrencies that are used to aid children in crisis.

This implementation of web mining to assist not for profit organizations is a stark contrast to earlier uses of in-browser mining applications, which have previously been used to hijack browsers in order to hijack user computers without their consent.

Some sites have been using optional in-browser mining in lieu of advertising revenue.

On the other hand, popular piracy focused torrenting site The Pirate Bay caused furor in the online community by covertly deployed a similar web mining client on their site in order to replace their ad revenue.

During a site-wide trial period, a typo in the miner code caused the software to occupy all unallocated resources, forcing the visitor's computer to grind to a halt.

This software uses a Javascript based mining client to mine Monero, a privacy, and security-focused coin, of which CoinHive takes a 30% cut.

While CPU mining is not as powerful as it's GPU counterpart, it is ubiquitous across all computers, allowing the sites to make up for the lack of power in sheer numbers.

UNICEF's transparent approach to mining is made evident by the site UI, in where visitors are required to turn off Adblock, opt-in to the donation process and then allowed to control exactly how much of the system resources are being occupied by the mining process with a simple slider.

Unicef's design and implementation of web mining technologies perfectly illustrate the current dynamic of responsibility within the cryptocurrency community.