The Pirate Bay is using your PC’s computing power to mine the Monero cryptocurrency (XMR) to generate profit for the website, but this time they are giving you a warning that they will use your CPU for mining purposes while you are browsing the content of the website.
Agree to It or Leave the Website!
When you visit the website of Pirate Bay you will receive a notification warning you that the website will use your computer and it reads like this: “By entering The Pirate Bay you agree to XMR mining with your CPU. If you do not agree please leave the website or disable adBlocker.”
Reasons Behind Mining With Their User PCs.
The result of discovering cryptocurrency mining scripts on websites has caused an uproar in the community from many users. At one point a website hosting service provider Cloudflare announced that it will ban any website which uses hidden scripts for mining cryptocurrency.
This was not the first time that the Pirate Bay was caught using hidden scripts for mining cryptocurrency with their users PC’s and has even continued doing such practices after getting exposed to that they responded by saying that it was just an experiment to find a way how to remove ads from the website whilst still generating enough money to keep the site running.
By the way, how The Pirate Bay website is running now, it seems like the experiment was successful and despite receiving negative responses from the community it is worth generating revenue for the website by mining cryptocurrency with the users of the website CPUs.
A Legitimate Practice or Just Cryptojacking?
Using the visitor’s computer is not an original idea by The Pirate Bay and has been practiced by a vast amount of other websites. You could say that it is an innovation for generating revenue for websites because a lot of users nowadays use some kind of ad-blocking add-on to their web browser that reduces the income generated by websites placing advertisements, and also Google and Facebook dominate the field of advertisement placement in a way that they gain most of the profit from it not the websites using the services. This has caused websites to use mining scripts to generate revenue for staying alive.
If this practice is done correctly it can be seen as a legitimate practice. A correct way of doing it would be to give the user of the site a choice to support the website by agreeing that their PC will be used to mine cryptocurrency whilst browsing the contents of the website.
This practice can also be used in a bad way. If the website is doing it without letting the user know about it or when hackers could use it to inject your PC with a code that would mine cryptocurrency even when you are outside of the website, this practice is also known as cryptojacking.
Negative Side of Such Practice
Visitors of sites that do such practices have complained that their processors are running at abnormal temperatures whilst just browsing the website and that they are experiencing performance throttling. This time after an inspection was made about this scandal it was discovered that The Pirate Bay is using a script that uses more of your CPU than it did before. This time it was set to throttle at a rate of 0.9 whereas before it was somewhere between 0.6 to 0.8.
