There were issues with the server the backend is running on, so the backend was down for a few days. During that time, any miner applets embedded in any pages shut themselves off (since they're designed to do so when they can't reach the server) and no shares were generated. During that time some major issues came up in my life so I unfortunately didn't have time to fix the problem. The server is back up and running again.


The payout system isn't fully automated at this point. I've written out the code so that it could be fully automated, but I'm running the payout script manually at this point so that I can keep an eye on it to make sure that it's doing the right thing, just to be safe.

Anyway, your 0.01btc should be sent later on tonight.


In case you hadn't noticed, this project is open source, you're free to run it on your own server. In fact, you'd probably generate more that way, since the lack of bandwidth congestion would likely reduce the number of stale shares by a substantial amount. The only real advantage of running through our server at this point is that you don't have to set a backend up on your own server, so it's convenient.

Unfortunately, we're really not making much of any profit on this at all. We've personally made about 0.012btc (about 17 cents at the current conversion rate) total during the 3 weeks or whatever since we started this project. Basically, it's barely enough to provide a buffer space for payouts. A couple people have made a somewhat substantial amount, considering how little bandwidth our server has at this point and how badly it's getting slammed, anyway. Hopefully this will be profitable for us in the future somehow or other, but at this point, it's just an experiment.

It's almost ready, a basic version should be up later tonight.



Yes. It's still being worked out right now. Minimum withdrawal should be coming down very soon.  Just trying to figure out the logistics of the situation, and how to approach the situation while maintaining our "no account" policy.



The payout threshold should be coming down soon, probably to somewhere around 0.01 btc. Allowing people to set custom thresholds under 0.01 btc or something like that would mean people would have to set up accounts though, and I'd like to keep things as simple and straightforward as possible, though if there's enough demand for it then I might add accounts to the system. If you run the source yourself, you can use any mining pool you want. We haven't set up any fees or anything like that yet, though probably will somewhere down the road if only to keep our servers running.  The payout is still being adjusted, and will be updated very soon.. 


I've tested the applet out on a bunch of older, slower computers, and I haven't noticed any slowdown whatsoever. There's no "lag" or anything like that. BitJAM runs at a low priority in the background and only uses idle cpu cycles. See the my previous posts up the page for a better explanation.


No problem, I'm glad people find it useful


Yeah, the backend is open source, so you could do that. You'll need port 15063 forwarded to the machine the backend is running on.

Basic stats should be available later tonight.


httplib.HTTPConnection's arguments changed in python 2.6:

http://docs.python.org/library/httplib.html#httplib.HTTPConnection

I'll try to get a fix in for the next commit to github.

 **06/12/2011  -- UPDATE: Official launch of the BitJAM website-embeddable Bitcoin mining code. Availible at www.bitjam.org**

That's pretty cool, there're three problems though:

First, the link is broken (403 forbidden, probably either a permission issue or lack of an index page), so I had to go up a directory to access anything, and the source is inaccessible.

Second, the user would have to confirm a security popup in order for the applet to run, since java's security policy disallows access to anything related to hardware accelerated rendering (even opengl), so any user visiting the page would get some unknown popup when they visited the page, probably assume it's malware, and leave.

Third, the security popup never came up, and the code didn't run. I'm guessing the code is probably throwing an exception somewhere and failing before it gets a chance to ask the user for permission.

Thanks! I hope people will find it to be useful



Well, I anticipated that some people would have negative feelings towards this. I considered the potential negative aspects of a project like this before I started. Although the idea might sound bad initially to some people, I think that any possible negative aspects can be dealt with rather easily, and the idea has a lot of potential to offer new options to people.

And about the Javascript miners... Javascript can really bog things down if it's doing a lot of work, but it seems that Java applet threads don't seem to make much of an impact on performance on cpu time. From my experiments / messing with stuff, it seems that java applets get a low priority so they won't interfere with or lock up a user's computer. The developers of Java are really huge on security (there are some pretty bizarre things applets aren't allowed to do), so this wouldn't suprise me. Or maybe it just plays more nicely with the cpu scheduler or something. Either way, the Java applet doesn't seem the bog things down like Javascript can.



I'm pretty sure this wouldn't run on most (if any) smartphones:

Android/Blackberry:  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2433338/is-there-a-possibility-to-run-applets-on-android-or-blackberry
iPhone:  http://www.iphonefaq.org/archives/9731

Even if a smartphone could run applets, it probably still wouldn't run due to security restrictions, and even in that case, you could filter them out by http header.

As for laptops, that's a pretty different issue, but it still probably wouldn't be a problem. If there's an outlet available nearby, people usually tend to plug in to save their battery life for when they really need it, and also so that their system will run faster since the OS isn't throttling the cpu, harddrive, etc. to conserve power. So what if there are no power outlets around? Well, If someone's browsing the web, they're almost certainly using wifi, and that would imply that there would be power outlets nearby. If the the user doesn't have a wifi connection, the applet won't be able to connect, and it's designed to sleep when there's no connection, so it won't use any cpu time at all. So, in short:

connected to wifi?
   yes -> there should be a power outlet nearby, not a problem.
   no  -> miner shuts itself off until a connection is available, not a problem.



Java uses Just In Time compilation, which means it gets the chance to optimize the compiled code in a way that is able to take full advantage of the machine's capabilities, which means that there's a good possibility that the Java code could run faster than statically compiled C/C++, though it varies from one program to another. You might be able to get better performance out of C#/Silverlight since that also uses JIT, but it's not as portable as Java.



Not sure what you mean here. If you mean the time it takes for the VM to start up, all of that happens in the background (and doesn't even take very long) so it really has no effect on the user. If you mean the Java VM icon cluttering up the system tray in windows, I believe it should be hidden by default, and it doesn't show up on linux. (dunno about mac though)



I find your response understandable, but I think that if you consider the idea further, it seems apparent that it has the potential to make the web a better places in many different ways, and at very little or no cost to anyone.

The applet is designed so that it shouldn't noticably impact performance in any way, so I find it unlikely that people would even know it was served to their browser. It's just code that runs in the background, like Google Analytics, Quantcast, and the like.

Try running Ghostery (http://www.ghostery.com/), there's already tons of stuff like this running behind all the webpages you visit every day. The big difference here is, this code directly and solely benefits the webmaster, and it's arguably quite a bit less ethically questionable.

Many of the scripts that are served invisibly collect information about you so that companies can construct user profiles, which are used to construct statistics which are then sold, usually to marketing companies so that they can figure out how you think and determine which advertisements to show you so you'll buy more stuff from them. Personally, I think that the fact that companies are recording what you do on the internet, building a profile on you, and then selling it is quite a bit more bothersome than having a bit of code that you'd never even know existed run in the background for a minute or two.

Now, if technology like this began to replace advertising, it would mean that rather than having things you don't care about trying to grab your attention by filling up a good portion of your screen space, being blasted in your face with popups, and trying to blend into the page and disguise itself as actual content, an applet would run in the background, and it wouldn't interfere with the user's experience at all.

In addition, if something like this really caught on and people were to use this rather than web advertising, there wouldn't be as much of a need for the previously mentioned (more questionable) scripts, to collect user data to sell to marketing companies, so it could improve internet privacy, while at the same time making the internet a much cleaner, more concise environment.
   
Even if you don't see the value in this applet, I'm sure that it will be useful not only to web masters, but also to any developers of future distributed computing applications that could be used to, in an ideal world, offer a complete and viable replacement for web advertisements.

According to this, it seems that you can use Java in Firefox extensions:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/java_in_firefox_extensions

So yeah, if you modified the source code, you could probably do something like that, and since it wouldn't be an applet anymore, you could probably add an option to have it only kick in if the screensaver is on, or if there hasn't been any mouse/keyboard input for X number of minutes, so it would only run while the computer isn't being used.

Actually, if you can run non-applet Java code in an extension, it kinda makes me wonder if it'd be possible to get a Java gpu miner running in an extension too. The main problem with that would be that the computer would have to have a graphics card capable of using opencl, and the appropriate sdk would have to be installed.

 **06/06/2011 9:30am -- UPDATE: Official launch of the BitJAM website. www.bitjam.com**

Well, it doesn't send the hashrate back to the server, since that'd use more bandwidth and add complications, but there is a section in the applet code that's commented out, which prints the hashrate on the current machine to the status bar of the browser. One machine I tested got about 200khps, another got around 800khps, and I think I might be able to bump it up to a couple mhps on some machines if I restructure the applet code a bit.

06/06/2011 -- UPDATE: Official launch of the Bit•JAM website.
06/12/2011 -- UPDATE: Applet optimized for hyper-threading/multi core CPUs.  Hash rate increased exponentially.
06/12/2011 -- UPDATE: Official Launch of the embeddable browser miner! Drop it in your website/blog/whatever and start generating some "coin flow."
06/13/2011 -- UPDATE: Basic stats on the MyJAM page are now available.
06/20/2011 -- UPDATE: Enhanced statistics are now available on the MyJAM page. Payout system is up and going. 0.06 bitcoins have been paid out to various users so far. Various fixes on the backend (shouldn't crash anymore). Still need to take a look at python2.5 compatibility, some significant improvements should be coming soon.


Your website traffic could be generating Bitcoins for you. Is it?


Bit•JAM - Bitcoin Java Applet Miner - Allows you to do just that. We're open source, and with multi-threading capabilities we're the fastest browser miner on the web! Drop our embed code in your website and start generating some real "coin flow!" There's no sign-up, no user accounts, just plug in your walled I.D., copy, paste, and kick back.

Note: While the embed code is fully functional and stores a record of who has created what shares, it will not actually start paying out for another day or two as we are currently in the final testing stages of the payout code. Rest assured, however, that you may start using the embed code right now and your earnings will be safely and securely stored and recorded.

  
If you like Bit•JAM please donate some bitcoins

  1FyMZskjC9fXSYATVXP3TH3NNeD9E1Pynp