uTorrent EpicScale bitcoin miner

[MAsterV]

Just something kept popping up!!
Thought i should share it.

So basically it seems like with a update uTorrent installed a bitcoin miner on users computer.
That is why my computer kept over heating....  

https://torrentfreak.com/utorrent-quietly-installs-riskware-bitcoin-miner-users-report-150306/

So if you have uTorrent and would like to uninstall EpicScale - the software that does the mining:

Use the links below:
http://www.epicscale.com/statement-regarding-utorrent
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/how-remove-utorrent-epicscale-bitcoin-miner-windows-pc-1490965

[Monetizer]

I think it's quite unfortunate that utorrent is doing this... It really won't help Bitcoin reputation with people hearing about how there computer is being used by other people to get some bitcoin.

[Bizmark13]

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:

[finnile]

I think downgrading utorrent to to the 2.2.1 Version would be the best move for now, if you don't want to be running that software.  Its probably the most stable version out there.

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

[hedgy73]

Cheeky fuckers

[Bizmark13]

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

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:

Solving math problems for weather prediction, physics simulations, cryptography (including cryptocurrency mining) and more has real world value. We solve these problems on behalf of our trusted partners, and donate proceeds to your favorite charities.

[NUFCrichard]

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

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:

Solving math problems for weather prediction, physics simulations, cryptography (including cryptocurrency mining) and more has real world value. We solve these problems on behalf of our trusted partners, and donate proceeds to your favorite charities.

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!

[Bizmark13]

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

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:

Solving math problems for weather prediction, physics simulations, cryptography (including cryptocurrency mining) and more has real world value. We solve these problems on behalf of our trusted partners, and donate proceeds to your favorite charities.

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!

From what I've read, the program actually mines litecoins rather than bitcoins. It's still not the best choice of altcoin since there are many CPU mineable altcoins out there. I've done the calculations and every single one of them suggests that a computer mining LTC will only generate fractions of a cent per day assuming the average CPU is capable of 20 KH/s so I'm not sure what exactly it is that they're trying to achieve.

As for using supercomputers to mine, well it depends on the supercomputer. Some supercomputers use GPUs in addition to CPUs which would have been well suited for mining scrypt-based currencies until ASICs came into the scene in 2014.

[Agestorzrxx]

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

[NeuroticFish]

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!

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.

[Kevinrasf]

They should've done this ages ago.

Now its just a waste of reputation and energy.


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

[Monetizer]

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!

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.

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.

[NeuroticFish]

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.

I am just reading uTorrent forum. People complaining A LOT. Quite a lot migrating to other software.

The "guilty" part was a 3rd party "offer" software, which some claim it's installed silently with no user interaction. uTorrent team tell that you have to allow that, else it's not installed.
However, it can be uninstalled, it seems.


Though I have auto-update of uTorrent set, I have an older build which it seems it didn't give me this "present". So for now I unchecked the auto-update. If you have smaller version than 3.4.2 build 38913 I advice you to uncheck auto-update too for a while. I think that they'll stop this "offer".

[Bizmark13]

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

The program actually mines litecoins but otherwise, yeah. They wouldn't make much money at all.

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

Freeware often does. Free and open source software (FOSS) usually (but not always) doesn't.

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.

I posted a calculation on another thread here about how much money 1 million PCs would be able to make by mining bitcoins. The result was that 1 million PCs mining 24/7 at max performance would earn roughly $150 per day. Using the same hardware to mine altcoins would earn much more:

Assuming it could be written and not detected. It would pull either part of the cpu or part of the discrete gpu.

neither part does a lot of hashing.  Say you bleed 10 percent of the cpu or gpu.  maybe 50mh a pc so 20 pc's for 1 gh.

2000 pc's for 1th

2,000,000 pc's for 1ph.

not much more can be bleed off without detection.

So is it possible to make a virus that infects 2mill pc's sure.  and if you are never caught you hash at 1ph. my guess is it would be found out quickly. since all the pc's would be dedicating a decent amount of cpu/gpu/watts to the mining.

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?

[TheUnknownOne]

That's why my PC has been crashing on me lately (OVERHEATING) and then just crashing... 

[NUFCrichard]

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!

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.

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.

[gkv9]

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.

[NeuroticFish]

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.

If you insist, here is a copy of the story.
http://www.cio.com/article/2375474/security0/hacked-synology-nas-systems-used-in-high-profit-cryptocurrency-mining-operation.html
I consider $600k quite an amount of money. And it was on CPU!

[(oYo)]

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.

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.

[gkv9]

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.

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???