Simple Monero Miner

After installing the plugin, head over to Sidebar > Simple Monero Miner Options. You’ll be presented a guide on how to setup the miner.

You’ll need to signup on CoinHive first then grab the the API key and paste it on the Coin Hive Public Key input.

The dashboard design is not using the WordPress style guide and there are some upsells on the sidebar. Still – it has a lot of customizable options via which you can control throttle rate of mining, show overlay disclaimer, style the overlay, etc.

There are many options given to customize the overlay box. Personally I would prefer styling them via css as it looks pretty barebones by default and changing colors won’t do much. Then there’s a handy statistics section at the bottom for checking out how well the miner is doing.

After setting up the miner with the API keys, you show be able to see a notification box on the your website. This is how it looks like on mine(I’ve used the Notification Popup option btw):

Its pretty cool that it shows the controls for hashing as well as the statistics. This definitely puts Simple Monero Miner one step ahead of the competition.

This plugin does much more than other miner plugins. The files inside the plugin seems pretty safe. There are no signs of malicious urls or script injects.

As with other crypto plugins based on Coin Hive, this one loads the js file(which does the heavy lifting) from Coin Hive’s main site. The plugin mainly sets up the admin options. There’s a base64 encoded string in one of the js files but it seems like this has code for the premium version of this plugin.

Simple Monero Miner comes with all the necessary options needed to setup mining on your user’s browsers. There are various options available to control mining such as throttling, showing a banner to notify users, disabling mining on mobile devices, etc.

There’s also a pro version available but its unclear what exactly does it offer. The content on the pro version’s page does hint at unethically mining even when the user closes their tab which is something I would advise against.