Apps with millions of Google Play downloads covertly mine cryptocurrency

Post by ckuehl » Thu, Mar 27, 2014, 9:02 AM UTC

kevingadd wrote: post #39

logicchains wrote: post #38

I wonder how viable doing this openly would be as a free-to-play business model? Being upfront with the user: "we're not going to show you any ads and you won't have to pay anything for extra content, but we'll be using a tiny proportion of your CPU time to mine cryptocurrency to pay for the development costs of this app."

It was done secretly in the recent past, and apparently while it lasted (weeks, i think?) it brought in something like $6k. It helps that most gamers have fairly powerful graphics cards. If you mapped bitcoins mined to microtransaction currency (for in-game rewards) most players would love it.

Post by warp » Thu, Mar 27, 2014, 9:16 AM UTC

TrainedMonkey wrote: post #24

herf wrote: post #10

These schemes mostly just convert electricity to cryptocurrency. The electricity is almost always more expensive than the value, but the app authors aren't paying the bill. If you're plugging in your 5W charger for less than half the day, the limit is maybe $2/year/user, assuming you can get away with it for a year...

$2 is way too high. I would say a cent per week tops.

Post by zimpenfish » Thu, Mar 27, 2014, 9:27 AM UTC

svas wrote: post #19

I've been working on an idea similar to this for a few months. Instead of limiting this to crypto currency mining (a fair application, FWIW), why not approach this with the idea that people plugging in their phones every night could easily constitute the largest distributed supercomputer ever built? Everyone has the same nightly ritual: Wake up, use phone/tablet/device, plug in at night. Once it's plugged in, your ph…

Post by vlasev » Thu, Mar 27, 2014, 9:40 AM UTC

Post by untog » Thu, Mar 27, 2014, 10:08 AM UTC

UweSchmidt wrote: post #21

devindotcom wrote: post #4

This is pretty hilarious. Given how small the load can be to automatically contribute hashes to a pool for ___coin, I expect more of these in the future, but smarter. Runs for 5 seconds per minute on ten million devices for six months? That's no joke with some of the hardware out there. It's this close to a victimless crime (that is, unless the victim gets their CPU/GPU fried, as has happened with these nets before).…

It's the disdain for the user. Take their data, use their CPUs, whatever. Users are dumb, they won't notice, and hey, the app's free anyway. Back in the day, the software on my "Personal Computer" was my friend. It was all wonderful things to have and to learn about. Looking at my smartphone that's right here on my table, it's shiny, but I've long felt a distinct lack of control over the thing. And now this: Hello -…