A meeting of the German Pirate Party in Berlin in 2013. Photo: Getty Images

File-sharing websites are not exactly known for their sterling reputation, though a few such as famed torrent site the Pirate Bay have been around for long enough while generally avoiding shady behavior they’ve acquired a certain cachet with the internet community.


But gotta gett that cash, baby, and banner ads might not be cutting it any more in the age of ubiquitous ad blocking. The Pirate Bay has added a Javascript-based bitcoin miner to its homepage, Torrent Freak wrote, causing some users to notice “that their CPU usage increased dramatically when they browsed certain Pirate Bay pages.”



The plugin, which is provided by Coinhive, puts users’ computers to work mining Monero, a cryptocurrency released in 2014. According to Torrent Freak, the miner was throttled to rates from between 0.6 and 0.8, but does consume considerable resources; running a version of the plugin on Coinhive’s website does result in an immediate and hard to miss increase in CPU utilization.


Torrent Freak said they were told the miner was being tested for 24 hours as a possible replacement for traditional banner ads. In the meantime, users on the Pirate Bay’s subreddit were not happy, with several users complaining that the site never informed users the miner was running, let alone asked permission.

Using a file-sharing website was never going to be a risk-free endeavor, though users could disable the miner with a plugin like NoScript or ScriptBlock or by adding Coinhive to an ad blocker’s blacklist.

Embedding bitcoin-mining scripts into a website is not exactly new, though the secret addition of Coinhive to one of the world’s most popular file-sharing websites is throwing up red flags. As noted by BetaNews, Coinhive’s own documentation advises:

The miner itself does not come with a UI – it’s your responsibility to tell your users what’s going on and to provide stats on mined hashes. While it’s possible to run the miner without informing your users, we strongly advise against it. You know this. Long term goodwill of your users is much more important than any short term profits.


Malware which siphons unsuspecting users’ CPUs for spare cycles to mine cryptocurrency is a common problem, though peaked years ago in 2014, according to Quartz. The amount of processing power it takes to mine Bitcoin has risen 770-fold between 2014 and summer 2017, shifting the focus of bitcoin mining schemes to “giant, purpose-built warehouses” stuffed with thousands of servers. However, with the ongoing explosion in initial coin offerings and new crypto variants, there might still be opportunities to cash in with methods that have stopped working with older cryptocurrencies.

[Torrent Freak]