But recently, Denino's been hit with criticism for something different: hiding a cryptocurrency miner in a piece of software, CxStocks, that a bunch of his fans accessed through a website.
The idea behind CxStocks was humorously meta. CxStocks would be a faux stock market where people could buy and sell stocks, based on how well liked someone was on stream. It was a funny way for the hardcore to take fandom, knowledge, and memes to another level.
The hard part of CxStocks would be kickstarting an economy, and when the beta version of CxStocks went live yesterday, people discovered a surprising solution: a cryptocurrency miner that would run in the background, while you were using CxStocks. In order to trade on CxStocks, your CPU would be leveraged to generate currency for you to trade with. The fake economy would have a stabilizing center
and the creators would be making money.
CxStocks used Coinhive to accomplish this, a service in the news recently because torrenting website
The Pirate Bay tried to ditch ads by embedding Coinhive. If you were using The Pirate Bay to download torrents, your CPU was used to pay for hosting and other fees associated with running The Pirate Bay. The response from users was mixed, and while many supported The Pirate Bay trying to get rid of ads, they wanted to know why their CPU use was shooting up. (The Pirate Bay did a poor job of disclosing what was going on and initially borrowed too much power.)