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

Posted by EditorDavid on from the behind-the-scenes dept.

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.

5 of 123 comments (clear)

  1. Monero, not Bitcoin by Troed · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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    it's in my head
  2. Great idea by cerberusss · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So please note I'm not trolling in any way or shape. But in this particular case, on this particular site, I think it's a great idea.

    The Pirate Bay has been sailing strong for all these years, so the money has got to come from somewhere. Any source of donations will be quickly cut off by the establishment, and people donating will have to fear for their anonymity. Ads will probably not be very effective, since the average visitor will probably have an ad blocker.

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    8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
  3. Actually... by CharlesAKAChuck · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is not a terrible idea, as long as there's some control being exercised (which I'm sure there won't be...) The controls should be: The miner is only active when I'm on the site, it's not installed on my computer, and it's limited to, say, 50% of the available spare CPU cycles. I don't think I'd mind fewer ads (which I don't see anyway) in return for giving the site some of my spare CPU cycles to try to make a few cents.

  4. "Earn enough money" by willoughby · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Like they, or any website, are going to say, "Hey, this is enough money per month. Let's just stop here". Yeah, right.

  5. Re:Really? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Software miners are 10 to 100 times less efficient that ASIC miners. Since this is in JS, and no browsers currently run WebCL by default, this is likely at the high end of that range. So for every $1 that TPB collects, they may be wasting $100 of electricity that their users are paying for.

    This is unethical and environmentally irresponsible. Alas, even pirates can no longer be trusted.