The guys over at the E-Sports Entertainment Association had a great idea to help fun some of their upcoming tournaments, add a bitcoin client into their E-sports software and have their users mine bitcoins for them with their spare CPU and GPU cycles. Seems harmless right? Well, the guys at E-Sports forgot to tell everyone about their plan and in the end stirred up quite a controversy and people are understandably mad at them now. Arstechnica has more details on this story.
Competitive video gaming community E-Sports Entertainment Association secretly updated its client software with Bitcoin-mining code that tapped players' computers to mint more than $3,600 worth of the digital currency, one of its top officials said Wednesday.
The admission by co-founder and league administrator Eric ‘lpkane’ Thunberg came amid complaints from users that their ESEA-supplied software was generating antivirus warnings, computer crashes, and other problems. On Tuesday, one user reported usage of his power-hungry graphics processor was hovering in the 90-percent range even when his PC was idle. In addition to consuming electricity, the unauthorized Bitcoin code could have placed undue strain on the user's hardware since the mining process causes GPUs to run at high temperatures.







