How Some Private Torrent Sites Are Using Cryptocurrency Mining For Your Benefit

[grimm]

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Last month, it was reported that popular torrent website The Pirate Bay was mining Monero digital currency from the CPUs of the visitors. This move was received with much flak as the users weren’t made aware of such steps. This also gave rise to a number of ways to block websites from mining cryptocurrency without your permission.

Now, some private torrent websites are implementing a new way of crypto mining. As reported by TorrentFreak, a popular private torrent site is using crypto mining to give the user something back.

It’s also worth noting that the user has complete control over the mining process. There are buttons to start and stop the mining. You can also decide how many CPU threads to commit to the process.

Now let’s tell you how this mining affects the upload-credit. For those who don’t know, upload-credit is an important commodity on private trackers. For example, if you only download 1GB data and you upload 2GB, your upload credit will be 1GB. You can use this credit to download additional content. Some websites even allow people to donate money to receive upload credit.

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In this case, the tracker allows the user to mine a cryptocurrency and convert a part of it to the website’s native currency, i.e., upload credit. The users can use that native currency on the website. This way, both users and website owners get benefitted.

Another private torrent website has also implemented a similar system (see top image), along with displaying a top 10 list of miners. This is a good psychological move that inspires the users to donate their CPU power.

If used with user consent, cryptocurrency mining could turn out to be a viable way to generate revenue for torrent websites and other platforms. As long as the websites are giving the users proper controls and allowing them to opt-in/opt-out, the mining code is clean, things should be pretty fine.