What is Cryptocurrency mining?
Bitcoin isn’t the only cryptocurrency. The Epic Scale junkware bundled with uTorrent’s installer doesn’t attempt to mine Bitcoin — it attempts to mine Litecoin, which was inspired by and is very similar to Bitcoin.
Mining programs tap into your computer’s hardware resources and put them to work mining Bitcoin, Litecoin, or another type of cryptocurrency. And no, even if your hardware is used to generate money for them, you don’t get any of it. They get all the money from putting your hardware to work.
Worse yet, your desktop computer or laptop at home just isn’t powerful enough to profitably mine Bitcoin, Litecoin, or other cryptocurrencies. Doing this profitably requires specialized mining rigs with specialized hardware and cheap electricity. So, even if you put your computer to work mining Bitcoin for your own profit, you’d actually lose money. You’d run up your power bill as your computer draws more power, and you’d make back less than it would cost you in power.
In other words, cryptocurrency miners like the Epic Scale crapware or other malware programs that work similarly just run up your electricity bill for a small little bit of profit. The only reason they can profit is because they’re not paying the electricity bill — you are. You pay more in electricity so the junkware or malware authors can make a fraction of that in profit. That’s ridiculous.
