Is The Pirate Bay’s In-Browser Cryptocurrency Mining Better Than Its Crappy Ads

The modern internet runs on advertisements. Arguably the two most powerful companies in Silicon Valley—Facebook and Google—make billions of dollars in revenue each year almost exclusively by selling customer data to advertising firms. Although these products are nominally free, their users are actually paying in lost privacy.
Over the weekend, the torrent site Pirate Bay conducted an experiment to see if it could replace the advertisements that keep the site afloat with a new monetization scheme: Using visitors' browsers to mine cryptocurrency.
Although the Pirate Bay is perhaps the freest of free services on the internet, it has operating costs like any other website. Historically, these costs have been supported through ad revenue and donations, but as the Pirate Bay admins detailed in a blog post, "we really want to get rid of all the ads."
It makes sense. The Pirate Bay isn't exactly known for its tasteful and legitimate advertisements, which are often laced with malware. In fact, it was the Pirate Bay's terrible advertisements that prompted its co-founder Peter Sunde to argue that the site should be left to die after it was taken offline following a raid of its servers.