It has come to light that well-known illegal piracy site, The Pirate Bay has been “borrowing” its visitors CPU processing power in order to mine digital currencies as a source of revenue.

Exposed by Torrentfreak, it seems that the illegal torrent site has been secretly testing a Javascript Cryptocurrency miner on their page that allocates a large chunk of the visitor’s processing power to their mining operation.

Unhappy pirates

While The Pirate Bay is a well-known site, it’s one that clearly struggles with a revenue stream in the classical manner. Advertising and ad placement on the site is largely unavailable due to the nature of the content and as such, it seems as if the administrators of the site went looking elsewhere.

Mining cryptocurrency seemed to be their prefered choice, but this isn’t sitting well with users of the site, who were caught unaware by the sudden spike in their CPU’s usage while visiting.

“That really is serious, so hopefully we can get some action on it quickly. And perhaps get some attention for the uploading and commenting bugs while they’re at it,” a Pirate Bay user named “Sid” wrote in a comment, according to Torrentfreak.

Simply a test

According to The Pirate Bay, who responded to Torrentfreak, this was a test, and it was only to be performed for 24 hours.

Despite what The Pirate Bay says, they still have a few questions to answer, and furthermore, they raised a few philosophical questions about the regulation of mining.

Cryptocurrencies, as well as newly formed ones in the form of ICOs, have recently come under huge scrutiny, as places like China have upped their regulation, even inflicting bans.

This exploitation of users and their CPU power seems to be ethically wrong - even if it is done by a pirate website. Thus, should there be certain policies to restrict who can mine crypto, or should they subject erring users to penalties?

If the use of cryptocurrencies are being regulated, should the mining of said coins not also have some sort of laws and rules around them?

A balance must be struck, otherwise people are left unprotected and exposed to potentially exploitative methods — like those who “borrow” your CPU to earn a few virtual coins.