Bitcoin Forum

Yesterday I was looking at map that showed popularity of bitcoin worldwide and was wondering why Russia got the first place.
There is a good reason for bitcoin being so popular in Russia.
It is probably because there is a Russian TV channel that discusses bitcoin all the time: "Russia Today" TV (rt.com).
This may tell us how important is mediatic coverage for bitcoin popularity.

The economic system of Russia has been built from underground activity since the collapse of The Soviet Union. Bitcoin serves the Russian legally-black/grey power structures very well in laundering funds among other things, especially on an international-scale, since Bitcoin is not centrally managed.

Basically, my guess is Russian mobsters and criminals are picking up on it.

Russians happen to love internet money!

They can scam you out of BTC and they know their government will just ask for a cut in USD or Euro of course... Thats IF they even get noticed.

good networking skills

Nigerian Princes like bitcoin for the same reasons.

Coz Russia is quite big. If Bitcoin is spread equally around the globe, then it's normal that big countries have more bitcoin followers.

Nope, Russia has more bitcoin clients per million than pretty much everything outside other, even more extreme, Eastern European countries like Ukraine, and even if you correct for GDP its Bitcoin popularity is (or at least was back in February) nine times higher than expected.

I'm not sure what map you are looking at, but http://www.weusecoins.com/globe-bitcoin/ shows differently.

I got the answer. Mining gives free bitcoins. And russians love "xaлявa" (freebie).

Well, mined coins aren't exactly free but neither do they require hard physical or tedious labour! (Except by the mining rig that is.)

Where is this map you are looking at?

It's very cold in Russia. Many probably heat their houses with wood or old electric ovens that heat up over night. Might as well buy a lot of Gpus and get paid for an expensive necessity.

The answer lies in Russia's history.

That history has taught them in a very viscerally painful way not to trust paper currency (and central authorities that govern it).

Those holding the Euro are next to get this painful lesson... those holding the Dollar will get it soon after that.

Said, how clueless the average American is who's spending that paper. They have no clue how the Federal Reserve scam works.  Talk to the average Russian though, and they have a completely different view.

Cheers

After looking at that map, I'm not hell bent on becoming the first node from Antarctica.

and to answer the OP, well, what else is there to do in Russia?

Drink вoдкa? ;D

botnets

I am surprised how little attention this gets. There are hundreds of people making $10k+ per month with botnets. It doesn't even matter how good the hardware is when you have thousands of zombies. There are pre-made miners available for sale, some of which are completely undetectable. Once anti-virus detects them it is very easy to crypt them and carry on.

This is not a small scale thing. It is not an exception. This is happening on an absolutely massive scale and once people find out just how much of this is going on bitcoin is going to suffer, hard.

I'm not making this up. I'm not spreading FUD. This is a fact and it is my prediction that it will hit Bitcoin harder than anything else has done to date.

If you don't believe me just head over to some of the popular black hat forums and search for bitcoin.

Also, MMM.

As a guy who has Russian mentality I assure u that main cause is free money (bitcoins). :)

How would this hit bitcoin ?

Don't you think this will stop gradually once mining goes ASICs ?

+1

valid point

There are people, some just 16 year old script kiddies, that are making huge amounts of BTC with botnets and selling it off for profit.

How does it hit Bitcoin? Well for a start there are hundreds of thousands of computers out there that have viruses installed that are mining Bitcoins without peoples permission, that's not going to go down well.

There will be a difficulty increase as a result of the botnets, taking coin away from legitimate mining operations.

I see no reason why this would stop just because of ASICs. With ASICs you still have to buy the hardware. Here there is no start up cost at all unless you are buying/renting the botnet.

This whole state of affairs undermines bitcoin and is enough to destroy faith in the currency. Mining needs an overhaul, I don't pretend to know the solution.

+1000 I - Russian (from Russia). And yes, xaлявa... ::) Still very Russian gambling. And almost no one is paying for electricity. And the poor. Transferring money directly into rubles - 4x 5870 had revenue comparable to the average wage per month.

umm dead.

They make their own ASIC https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=104680.0

Great news, russians FTW. Where can I preorder an ASIC?

Sorry for the off-topic

I doubt the ASIC owners will allow themselves to be hacked and unaware that someone uses their hardware to mine BTC.
Once ASICs are common (1TH/s for $30k) most botnet operators will cease making substantial profits from mining due to huge difficulty increase.

In Russia, bitcoin mines you.

Yup sky is falling. Or you are clueless. ASIC will fix the botnet problem. Botnet are useful for other things, once bitcoins becomes less profitable they will move to other things. You say there is no cost but it's not true since botnets can be sold thus opportunity cost. When the cpu/gpu nets go from producing 100+ coins a month to 1 coin a month you can bet they will do other things with the zombies.

That doesn't require a large number of nodes in Russia.  

Still you aren't the first to bring up botnets, however the influence of botnets is small and waning.  Each generation has made botnets less suitable for Bitcoin mining (CPU -> GPU -> FPGA -> ASIC).  The average botnet node is a much older Windows XP box.  While top of the line CPU can push 20MH/s significantly older CPU can't.  For example an Athlon 64 X2 4000+ (an impressive CPU in its day) gets only 2MH/s and a 8 year old single core Celeron a fraction of a MH/s.  So even a 100,000 node botnet @ 100% load 24/7 would be maybe 100GH/s.  When you consider the average node may only be on 30% of the time and load needs to be throttled to avoid detection real world it might be more like 16 GH/s per 100,000 nodes.   FPGA would have killed botnets eventually but ASICs will do it much faster.  In 2013 difficulty will probably be 10x to 20x as high as now.  That combined with the subsidy cut means revenue per GH/s is going to fall to pennies a day. 

I would point out LiteCoin is particularly susceptible to botnets and while it can be mined with a GPU the ratio between CPU throughput and GPU throughput is relatively low thus it takes a smaller number of nodes to equal the entire hashing power of the LiteCoin network.  As Bitcoin becomes increasingly toxic to botnet they will migrate to LiteCoin and represent a larger and large portion of hashing power. 

It is popular to target gamers and bind malware with games and cracks, especially those that are popular atm. Even if the avg. gamer gpu does 50-150 MH/s with 10k bots it would be ~1TH/s (assuming 24/7 100% use, let's say 1/3 of that is a more realistic figure).

Bitcoin botnet operators even make AMAs now:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/sq7cy/iama_a_malware_coder_and_botnet_operator_ama/

No, you don't understand. You can still make huge amounts of coin at current difficult with botnets that exclusively use CPU miners. That's right CPU only miners. I am not saying it is ideal, and obviously the big players are doing GPU mining, but I am trying to make the point that ASIC is not going to be remotely close to "fixing the botnet problem".

Also we are not talking about 100+ coins a month. We are talking about people making 10,000+ coins a month each. It is a huge % of the total coins generated per month, I would not be surprised if botnets reached 50% of total hashpower in the future. It is only on the rise as more people with the knowhow find out how much can be made.

+1

especially with stolen electricity  ;)

From your own link.


13 GH/s to 20 GH/s on 10K nodes.  or ~1.65 MH/s per node.  Thanks for confirming what I wrote.

You're reading it wrong lol


10k is total # of bots.
A lot less is connected at a given moment.

Hmm. Hundreds x $10k+ = millions of dollars per month. 50 BTC/block x 144 blocks/day x 30 days/month x $11/BTC = $2.4 million/month.

TL;DR: You're wrong, there can't be "hundreds of people making $10k+ per month with botnets". Tens, maybe.

Rhetorically speaking, for example, why is there so much gun popularity in America?  ???

It does seem cultural in both cases; our people in current generations remember their or their elders' life savings being zeroed out overnight in the '90's...

Russia produces a great number of high-grade computer science people, who immediately recognize Bitcoin and p2p cryptocurrency as a revolutionary idea. As you know, russians love revolutions...  :D

Plus, it's a chance in some small way "to get out from under the thumb of The Man"...

It's simply cool to make "new money" yourself. I remember as a school kid in the Soviet Union, sometimes a fad would break out in school where many of us kids would take pieces of paper and turn them into our own, personal money notes by drawing intricate designs on them with magic markers, and trading them with our classmates...

As far as the criminal element, the russian crackers are a competent community, and have proven that in Bitcoin, but i think that professional, organized criminals still prefer USD, metal, and other more traditional money...  :D

Perhaps, we should ask our main topic starter and information gatherer, ArsenShnurkov, to do a poll on the Bitcoin penetration among the russian criminals...  ;)

Stolen electricity, university, and also computer centers with video game machines.  Run miner and pay for computer time and more.

Even electricity in Russia not charged at cost of production and transport.  Government limits price to make people happy about government.

Plus yes, free.

I didn't want to resort to this but since nobody believes me I am now going to link to a popular script kiddie forum. Bear in mind this place is full of kids, by the time stuff reaches this forum it has been going on for a LOT longer in the more professional (often russian) sites which I am not going to link to here.

http://www.hackforums.net/showthread.php?tid=2746015 - xyz bitcoin miner $9.99
http://www.hackforums.net/showthread.php?tid=2660054 - T-74 mining worm source $15/month $25/3 months $40/lifetime
http://www.hackforums.net/showthread.php?tid=2419991 - Botnet mining guide $6
http://www.hackforums.net/showthread.php?tid=2716838 - BTC mining bins $10
http://www.hackforums.net/showthread.php?tid=1454836 - Botminer $25
http://www.hackforums.net/showthread.php?tid=2715393 - FUD mining bins $5
http://www.hackforums.net/showthread.php?tid=2704501 - FUD bins $8/1BTC
http://www.hackforums.net/showthread.php?tid=2700900 - Miner builder $50
http://www.hackforums.net/showthread.php?tid=2847671 - FUD (fully undetected by antivirus) miner $10/1BTC
http://www.hackforums.net/showthread.php?tid=2765877 - Cheap FUD mining bins $2 each

There is a lot more but I can't be bothered to find it all again.

There is a bigger industry for bitcoin malware than the amount of bitcoin that is used for legitimate purposes. Some of these are not small operations, there are full blown software companies that sell malware builders, they existed before bitcoin but the more interest there is in bitcoin the more incentive they have to release bitcoin related products.

In my country, you do not mine bitcoins...bitcoins mine YOU!

I would think a lot has to do with the volitility of the currency making bitcoin a good value to use and an opportunity for profit

Networking is all about the ability to present yourself well, find valuable contacts and share experiences.
I think in Russia they are the best of the best.
Networking is fun  ;D

Is clear you do not spend time in Russia, my friend.  ;)

   +1

Where are they spending these bitcoin I theirs?