A new report has suggested that there are now hundreds of websites using PCs to mine cryptocurrency without the user’s consent. This comes after the popular torrenting website, The Pirate Bay took the lead and decided to forgo advertising for this method of fundraising.

Some were worried after checking their CPU usage to find that the website was taking up a large amount of it for cryptocurrency mining.

Mining is essentially the way that new coins, be it Bitcoin or Monero, can be dug up. Using computing power to solve various problems, users are rewarded for their computing power with coins e.g. money. If there are enough computers mining, it can make a solid amount of revenue for whoever is getting the coins.

Several websites have taken their lead and begun to use this as a way to make income for their sites. In a matter of weeks, around 2.2% of the top 100,000 websites listed are now using mining as a way to generate currency. This makes an aggregate audience of around 500 million susceptible to mining.With The Pirate Bay, the operators of the website used a script from the company CoinHive, which looks for Monero. The trial of using the users computers to mine for coins was simply used as a way to avoid having to put advertisements on the website. Some users did not find this to be okay, while others were more than happy to trade ads for a little bit of computing power.

The estimates put The Pirate Bay’s ability to raise capital at around $12,000 per month just in mining cryptocurrency alone. Due to the websites heavy traffic, this number will only increase as the popularity of the website increases. Hopefully, this can become a new form of revenue creation as time goes on.

Ravi Mandalia

The original: Typeboard