The news of Bitcoin’s soaring monetary value is always in the news. I remember when one Bitcoin was available for only $1 and nobody wanted it. And now one Bitcoin is close to $8000 and not many people can afford it. This hike in this digital currency has attracted all kinds of people and everyone wants to become rich using Bitcoin. There are so many Bitcoin mining machines being sold online and offline that you can start and leave running for months to mine the coins. And then there are people using the dark side of the internet to make Bitcoins – they are using bot networks to use a large number of computers to mine for them and also injecting scripts in web pages to use other people’s computers mine for them.
So if you are visiting a website, it could download JavaScript that is designed to use your computer into mining the Bitcoins for someone else. These JavaScript based miners can easily be blocked by blocking the servers that host these scripts. Your antivirus software should be blocking them, but for extra defense you can install the NoMiner extension in the Firefox web browser. This extension works in the new Firefox Quantum.
The NoMiner extension for Firefox is able to block the coin miner scripts such as the ones from Coinhive. Once installed in the Firefox web browser, it shows an icon in the Firefox toolbar and you can click on this icon to enable to disable the protection against the coin mining. When a script is blocked on a website, this icon also displays the counter for the number of scripts being blocked.
In the options for the NoMiner extension in Firefox, you can add or remove the server addresses on which the Bitcoin mining scripts are usually hosted. The instructions given in the options specify a special format to block the scripts. But there are no other options available for the extension.
You can get the NoMiner extension for Firefox from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nominer-block-coin-miners/.