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Comment by wodenokoto | Hacker News Reader

Why does the headline say "Bitcoin mining offer during install" when the posts in the forum talks about silent install of crapware?

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The crapware in question is a bitcoin miner.

My point was, why does the headline say "offer" when it is not offered but silently installed. Sorry for the poor articulation.

Oh sure, it's an offer -- you just can't refuse it.

No... you can.

The problem is they use reverse psyc, hidden triggers, double negatives, etc.

For example, I can't remember if it was Downloads.com or SourceForge, I recently almost installed Vosteran because the option to deselect the "extra awesomeness" was hidden in "Advanced Install" section and I had clicked on "Normal Install".

I've also seen plenty of "Accept Offer" with "Decline Offer" next to it, greyed out like it was disabled.

Plenty of examples exist of them TECHNICALLY giving you an opt-out - but hiding that opt out in every way imaginable.

I doubt it's a bitcoin miner. Probably some altcoin. Bitcoin mining is not profitable on CPU anymore, no matter how many general purpose CPUs you have at your disposal (fair approximation).

It's profitable if you use other people's computers and don't pay for the wasted electricity. It's straight stealing though.

Depends on what you mean by profitable

For a modern top of the range CPU you can expect maybe ~5MH/s (likely even less)

If 1 million people install utorrent and have their processors mining constantly, you can expect a daily profit of about $14

As far as I know uTorrent has hundreds of millions of users, it's not going to be amazingly profitable, but still significant revenue. (I don't see any recent figures, but they were at 150m monthly users over three years ago.)

It could be a Bitcoin miner put in by people who don't understand how worthless that would be.

See: How people have found miners running on compromised NAS boxes and even DVRs.

yeah, Litecoin actually

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