Can The Pirate Bay Replace Ads With A Bitcoin Miner? (betanews.com)

Mark Wilson writes: When it comes to the Pirate Bay, it's usually movie studios, music producers and software creators that get annoyed with the site — you know, copyright and all that. But in an interesting twist it is now users who find themselves irked by and disappointed in the most famous torrent site in the world.

So what's happened? Out of the blue, the Pirate Bay has added a Javascript-powered Bitcoin miner to the site. Nestling in the code of the site is an embedded cryptocurrency miner from Coinhive. Users who have noticed an increase in resource usage on their computers as a result of this are not happy.
TorrentFreak reports the miner is being tested for about 24 hours -- as a possible way to earn enough revenue to remove advertising from the site.

Comments

Monero, not Bitcoin

[Troed]

You could expect tech news site to know the difference between different crypto coins. No matter if you try to mine Bitcoin on millions of computers you will not get any, only dedicated data centers with thousands of ASICs can reach the hashing power needed.

Monero, like some other altcoins, can be mined on CPUs and/or GPUs.

Re: Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, they likely get a significant amount traffic per day considering they serve the entire planet essentially.

Assume each user spends 5 min on the site looking through the list of torrents that best match their search.

That compute power can really add up especially if your using it to replace revenue you would get from ads.

Honestly I don't see any issue with it as long as it's disclosed. In fact I wouldn't have a problem with most websites using it provided it was opt in. Then I could turn my adblock back on for some sites I like while still contributing to their revenue.

It would also be pretty cool if sites like Netflix added something like this and offered profit sharing on it for the user. 50/50 split on profit and you can turn it off and on easily from any page on the site. Same for YouTube. We mostly watch YouTube and Netflix, I wouldn't mind making some money off that while they use some of my PC's resources. The trick would be limiting how much power it uses so the user never loses money and also so it never causes your PC to increase any fan curves more than say 10%.

Sure I could mine myself but I honestly don't care enough about it. Having someone else set it all up and do the work for me then all I do is use my PC like normal...sounds fine by me.