The Pirate Bay put 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. In an interview with TorrentFreak, founder Peter Sunde, who has been running the website since 2003, said he was surprised by how quickly his servers were able to handle the influx in traffic.
The Pirate Bay put 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 ad revenue, although many visitors objected to the code being imposed without any prior notification and urged Pirate Bay to disable its test.