That's really dumb, bad for users, bad for the environment and without clear benefits to uTorrent.

Why? Because ASICS that's why.

To illustrate. A Macbook Pro bought a few years ago costs $1200 today. Its CPU will get you 1.8 megahash per second. It uses about 250 watt at max CPU.

Meanwhile, an ASIC today costing about $350 will get you over 1 million MH/S and its max watt usage is about 590.

Considering uTorrent isn't specialized mining software, and considering you'll only use about 25% of CPU or so (and that is way too much itself), you're looking at being able to run about 10 million megahash per second on an ASIC for the same cost of running 2 MH/S on a MBP.

Now consider that this ASIC is available to you and me, and that even better ASICS are used by mining farms in China with access to electricity that's 2x - 4x cheaper than what you're paying at home, purchased at factory prices even lower than the $350 I mentioned above.

What does it all mean? It means that if you run a Macbook Pro at today's hashrate for 30 years, 24/7 at 100% of CPU, you will earn $0.07.

So just think about what uTorrent is doing to you. If they took 50% of your CPU for the 8 hours you use your device each day the next year, they'd make 1/25th of a single penny, and that 50% extra CPU would cost you about $20 in electricity, and reduce the lifetime of your computer.

This idea would have been brilliant years ago, before ASICs. Today it's one of the dumbest ideas in the world. It can cost your users tens of dollars, slow down their computers, reduce the lifetime of their hardware and generates virtually no money for you in the process.

Even with 1 million Macbook Pros running this year round, they'd make $700 while generating tens of millions in extra electricity costs.

If they think that 1 million users opening their app every single day and running it for 8 hours to generate $700 is a lasting business model, then I think that's very telling of where uTorrent is headed. I say that even if it didn't cost users 50% of their CPU and a few dollars a month in the process.

-- quick edit: Bitcoin would actually be a very interesting usecase for torrent technology. You could for example attach a bitcoin address to each torrent packet. Then a torrent client could verify if the packet contains valid data (like normal), and automatically send a microreward (e.g. 1/millionth of a penny) back to whoever supplied you that packet. Each user could connect a bitcoin wallet and set a reward for various things he's downloading (e.g. $1 for a 1960s vintage album that can't be found anywhere, or 1 cent for the guy sending him House of Cards).

You could completely monetize seeders on a voluntary pay-what-you-want basis. And uTorrent could offer an option to send 1% of these 'donations' to uTorrent itself automatically. It'd generate a lot more revenue than mining, while costing the user a fraction, and incentivize seeding of a whole range of new content and make torrenting more popular than ever, without having to rely on centralized payment systems that would shut it down immediately.

It's just one of many ideas. I'm all for cryptocurrency and torrents, but this particular product just makes no sense.