The Pirate Bay posted code on some of its web pages that used a portion of visitors ' unused machines to mine virtual currency . "Do you want ads or do you want to give away a few of your CPU [central processing unit] cycles every time you visit the site?" they asked. The hidden code helped the file - sharing site to generate coins for the monero digital currency , which is currently worth around $ 100 per coin . Representatives of Pirate Bay said that using the code had been an experiment to see whether it could find a way to end its dependence on user machines , although many visitors objected to the code being imposed without any prior notification and urged Pirate Bay to continue its work .
The Pirate Bay posted code on some of its web pages that used a portion of visitors ' unused machines to mine virtual currency . The hidden code helped the file - sharing site to generate coins for the monero digital currency , which is currently worth around $ 100 per coin . Representatives of Pirate Bay said that using the code had been an experiment to see whether it could find a way to end its dependence on user machines , although many visitors objected to the code being imposed without any prior notification and urged Pirate Bay to continue its work .