Topic: uTorrent EpicScale bitcoin miner (Read 1690 times)

The trick is to read through each and every step of the installation CAREFULLY. This goes for all software, but uTorrent especially. What uTorrent did was that they wrote their installer so that it can be quite easy to overlook the fact that you agreed to install Epic Scale which tricked some users into thinking that it was not optional. If you don't want your home computer to become a Litecoin mining rig, then this is the part of the installation that you should look out for:

You don't need to remove uTorrent unless you are trying to make a statement. I wasn't "tricked" into installing EpicScale, and don't feel like that was uTorrent's intention, so I'm still using uTorrent.

uTorrent isn't the only one doing this. Nearly every other company out there is trying to sneak a little something extra in their installs. People need to do a little due diligence these days (and not just blindly click the 'next button') to prevent unwanted programs from being installed on their computers. This is unfortunately just the way it is and I can only imagine it's going to get worse, not better.

In March 2015, it was alleged that µTorrent had automatically installed a program known as Epic Scale—a program classified as "riskware" by some security programs, which mines the cryptocurrency Litecoin in the background for charity (a cut of which is given to BitTorrent, Inc.), utilizing CPU and GPU power.

uTorrent isn't the only one doing this. Nearly every other company out there is trying to sneak a little something extra in their installs. People need to do a little due diligence these days (and not just blindly click the 'next button') to prevent unwanted programs from being installed on their computers. This is unfortunately just the way it is and I can only imagine it's going to get worse, not better.

Thanks for the answer...
But one more thing I wish to know is, if it ain't the intention of uTorrent itself, why would they allow such a software as an add-on during uTorrent's main software installation???

You don't need to remove uTorrent unless you are trying to make a statement. I wasn't "tricked" into installing EpicScale, and don't feel like that was uTorrent's intention, so I'm still using uTorrent.

Thank you OP for sharing such a useful information...
Though I would like to ask you one thing, that is it just EpicScale we should delete, or we need to get rid of uTorrent also?

I personally am a fan of uTorrent and I didn't ever think that why they would do that...

As you said, even due to this, my lappy was always experiencing over-heat problems, and due to it, I ain't even able to do multi-tasking nowadays as I am a crazy movie downloader.

https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/harvard-student-uses-14000-core-supercomputer-mine-dogecoin/

That is the story I remembered.  A 14,000 core supercomputer, but it was only about as good as 13 good GPUs.  I think that is a good representation of how bad CPUs are at mining Bitcoin/Litecoin/Dogecoin.

Last time I mined Doge with CPU I got for a day of mining less than what I get from a faucet in one visit.


But there was some exploit for Synology NAS that installed Dogecoin miners and the hacker got some bucks at that point (lower diff, higher Doge, higher BTC). I don't have the patience to search for that news, it's about 8-10 months old, I think.
So basically if you chose the right coin, this can work. It's a shame that uTorrent actually does this - with or without an EULA.

Use CPU to mining bitcoin?
What a stupid idea.
they can't mine a bitcoin with more than 10 years.

Still you should read the installers, free software always tries this BS to install crap on your PC.

But could you imagine with say 1 million cpu's all running at once? They might be able to make a fair bit from that, also I don't think this was utorrent itself.

If 20 PCs equal 1 GH/s then wouldn't you need 20,000 PCs for 1 TH/s and 20,000,000 PCs for 1 PH/s?

Anyway, both Bitcoin mining viruses and non-SHA-256 altcoin mining viruses would be profitable (it is free electricity, after all). A 1 million PC botnet where each PC is capable of 50 MH/s would have a total hashpower of about 50 million MH/s or 50 TH/s. At the current difficulty, the botnet operator would get a reasonable-ish passive profit of $150* per day according to Coinwarz.

However, the botnet operator could earn much more than this if he chose to mine CPU and GPU mineable altcoins instead. If he mined Darkcoin and we assume that each PC has 3 MH/s of X11 hashing power, he would get $75,000** per day!

Viruses that mine scrypt-based currencies would fall somewhere in the middle as they have ASICs built for them but the performance difference between ASIC mining and GPU mining is not as extreme as SHA-256.

*If the miner only mined at 10% max performance to prevent the PC owners from finding out, it would only bring in $15 a day.

**Again, if the miner only mined at 10% max performance, it would bring in $7,500 a day. I'm not sure if this is practically feasible though since dumping that many coins on an exchange every single day would depress the price and surely the exchange owners will find out?

But could you imagine with say 1 million cpu's all running at once? They might be able to make a fair bit from that, also I don't think this was utorrent itself.

Last time I mined Doge with CPU I got for a day of mining less than what I get from a faucet in one visit.


But there was some exploit for Synology NAS that installed Dogecoin miners and the hacker got some bucks at that point (lower diff, higher Doge, higher BTC). I don't have the patience to search for that news, it's about 8-10 months old, I think.
So basically if you chose the right coin, this can work. It's a shame that uTorrent actually does this - with or without an EULA.

I read a while ago about a supercomputer being used for Doge mining, it wasn't very good, I beleive better than a good GPU, but nothing special, not worth wasting supercomputer time for anyway!

Even with thousands of computers mining for them, is it even getting them anything?  I thought CPU mining was so slow compared to GPU and especially ASIC mining that even 1 millions CPUs would essentially be useless for bitcoin mining.

I read a while ago about a supercomputer being used for Doge mining, it wasn't very good, I beleive better than a good GPU, but nothing special, not worth wasting supercomputer time for anyway!

The Epic Scale software is actually supposed to do a lot more than simply mining Litecoin. From what I've read, it's mostly just a cryptocurrency miner at this stage but there are plans to expand the range of applications further beginning with genomic computations. According to their official site, the following gives a general idea of what the software will do once the software is fully developed:

It does seem they worded about the miner to avoid people from knowing its the miner they were running.

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