BROWSER MINING! All you do is browse the web on Google Chrome and earn BTC!

One simple extension installed from CryptoTab and you can earn FREE Bitcoin while you surf the web! What a great opportunity! You must be nuts not to do it!

OH HELL NO!

I can not begin to describe how heartily sick I am of human beings abusing one another! The crypto world is particularly bad when it comes to abusing the good faith of trusting souls. Damn scammers! You're holding up mainstream crypto adoption by giving it a bad name! 😡

I've heard about browser mining before. Having some knowledge of both crypto mining and PCs, I dismissed it as infeasible for technical reasons which I shall not go into. Today it popped up on my radar again. Someone had tried it and was very pleased with the 0.0000000XXXXX BTC he had already earned.

🚨 RED ALERT! 🚨

BTC is divisible to 8 decimal places. You can earn 0.0000000X BTC, but not 0.0000000XXXXX. It makes no sense. The only reason someone would possibly do that is to make an infinitesimally small payment look bigger.

Right now 1 BTC is worth roughly $8000; 0.1 BTC is $800; 0.001 BTC is $8.00. And 0.00000001 BTC? It's worth a whole $0.00008. Eight one thousands of a cent!

What are these guys showing you? A figure that spilts that minuscule amount into units ten thousand times smaller still! They measure down to $0.000000008! Clearly this is lunacy. Lunacy designed to catch the unwary.

Congratulations sir, you have been mining with us all day! You have now mined 450 000 of our premium BTC units!

Thanks, I'm rich! Eh, what's each BTC unit worth?"

*whispering* "$0.000000008"

So today I've earned the princely sum of $0.0036?

Yes

So it will take me almost three days to earn just one USD cent?

That's correct sir.

I won't even make $1.50 in a YEAR?

Right again sir

And that's not counting the transfer fees to get it to my wallet...

Hang on, it get's worse!

Pyramid and ponzi schemes have become so common they they don't even try to hide it properly any more. This one tries to use the pyramid as a marketing technique!

With God as my witness those (minus my obvious bit of word editing) are the pictures on their site! Absolutely no shame! BOOM! They just dump you at the top of the pyramid, when in actual fact they sit there themselves. Never have I seen a pyramid scheme so blatantly show you, with graphics, that they truly are a pyramid scheme.

What they have built is genius. A huge decentralised mining network, that people voluntarily contribute towards and defend when necessary. The more people that mine, the richer the guys up top get. All while paying out rewards so small that it would take years to claim one and get more than a dollar or two after transfer fees.

Look: it's true that BTC value generally climbs. $0.01 worth of BTC today may be worth $1.00 two years down the line. But as BTC value grows, so does mining difficulty. That trickle of pseudo-sats will slow down more and more as the mining network difficult increases. So it evens out at the end of the day.

Bit Brain is biased, he's an evil sceptic who picks on things for no reason!

"There is a referral bonus, the more people you refer, the more you earn!"

And BANG! goes the nail in the coffin. Pyramid scheme from start to finish. If you don't know why a pyramid scheme is bad, then you need to find out ASAP!

"Okay Bit Brain, I hear what you say, but it's not hurting me, it's free. Who cares if the guy at the top is using my friends and I to mine for him? We still get a little free BTC!"

No you don't.

Because you ARE mining. That Chrome extension is running your CPU more than it normally would run. That's drawing more current, that's using electricity, that's costing money! (Unless your PC happens to be solar powered/wind powered etc.)

Electricity prices differ from place to place. But short of free electricity, I can only ever see you making a loss from running this extension!

What if you refer a lot of people? Can't you make money then? Well firstly, they've already done that. You are already well down the earning chain. Secondly, you don't have that many friends.

I've been using KuCoin exchange almost from the very beginning. KuCoin also has a referral program that allows me to score some free crypto in tiny amounts. KuCoin is truly free though, no hidden electricity cost! Why am I telling you about KuCoin? Because I have been posting my KuCoin referral link for a long time. Thousands of people must have seen it, perhaps over 10000 or even over 20000. How many people have used my link?

Ten

That's all. I must have easily posted it 100 times and I have 10 people. Let's look at the CryptoTab referral example on their webpage:

See how simple that is? All I need to do is to recruit 1579 people to sign up! 😂 Easy peasy!

No no guys, really; I'm just being negative. With the BTC price doing this how can I not get rich?

Perhaps they should update their graph a bit and stop using the hype inducing non-logarithmic scale!

Conclusion:

WATCH OUT FOR SCAMMERS, TRUST NO ONE! (Except for Bit Brain)
This scam doesn't initially look like a scam at all. On the face of it it sounds legit "earn free BTC by running a script while you browse". It doesn't really harm you, but make no mistake THAT SCRIPT IS NOT FOR YOUR BENEFIT, IT IS TO MAKE A SCAMMER RICH! You'll lose a dollar or two in electricity each year that you run the script. But somewhere out there is a guy taking a cut of all the mining from thousands of other unsuspecting people's computers, He's getting all his mining done for free thanks to people like you. HE IS USING YOU!

If you are new here and don't trust me yet, go on over to https://getcryptotab.com/en/chrome/ and see for yourself. Run the numbers, work in the electricity - see what happens! 😉

Yours in crypto,
Bit Brain

Acknowledgement: All pictures (some modified by @bitbrain) are from the CryptoTab website:https://getcryptotab.com/en/chrome/

DISCLAIMER:
I am neither a financial advisor nor a professional trader/investor. This is not financial advice, investment advice or trading advice. Unless otherwise stated, all my posts are my opinion and nothing more. Crypto is highly volatile and you can easily lose everything in crypto. You invest at your own risk! Information I post may be erroneous or construed as being misleading. I will not be held responsible for anything which is incorrect, missing, out-of-date or fabricated. Any information you use is done so at your own risk. Always Do Your Own Research (DYOR) and realise that you and you alone are responsible for your crypto portfolio and whatever happens to it.

All pics from the scammers at https://getcryptotab.com/en/chrome/ and modified by yours truly