Bitcoin Forum

Curious if anyone can guess a VERY rough ballpark on this.

How much total hashing power do you think an existing large-scale botnet could generate if it were targeted at mining? Assume that some non-zero number of the victims have decent video cards that are being exploited.

Over 9,000 Ghash/s.

I think you could not really pull a GPUminer on bots - that usually need drivers installed correctly etc and it really slows down system performace - I think it would slow down their computers too much so most of the victims would simply buy new hardware.

However, I'm administering a Computer pool with 80 machines here for work, and thos machines have to stay on at night but theres no one being able to use them, so what I can tell:

CPU: Intel Q6600 -> 4 MHash/s/Machine
GPU: GF 8800 GT -> 25 MHash/s/Machine

that makes roughly between 25 and 30 MHashes per machine, for me it's about 2GH/s, but of course a large scale bot network could do much better.

people who are botnet victims tend to not have the best PC's.  You are talking weak CPU's and onboard graphics.  Not the kind of equipment that is good at all for mining.

no one will notice the thousands of extra money being spent on power or anything

good luck with your job

Lol sounds like someone is jealous.  This is a great way to utilize PCs that are otherwise wasting power doing nothing.

They will draw more power when mining, someone's going to notice the spike in the electricity bill...

Current is delivered upon demand. a 450W PSU doesn't always draw 450W. That's just the max it can deliver under load. 80 workstations running full-tilt for a sustained amount of time will add a noticeable increase on next month's power bill. If you're the one ultimately in control of those 80 machines, all fingers point to you.

I'll still have a job on Monday.  You jelly?

Okay, do you have any idea how much wattage a computer pulls when its sitting there doing nothing compared to when its mining?

Also, jealous? I work in the IT field for a company where I have access to around twice as many machines (idle overnight) as he does (granted they do not have capable graphics cards) and as easy as it would be to hide mining from the users, you can't hide the power bill.

I concur with all against this idea! An idle computer uses <50w, if you're talking sleeping computers, then it could be as low as 1w. Now crank that up to full bore mining, and you are talking 300w+ per machine. A HUGE difference that tight assed big wigs will notice

sure I'll have one. Theres about 3 dozen of Sun Sunfire UltraSPARC stations in the basement, Network switching equipment for 30 GBit/s internet access, and a GSM Cellular Network Broadcasting cell on the roof. I mean, with the Sunfires alone, we're talking about an average load of 1500W/Machine. Also the machines I'm using are intended to do real computing during daytime, so it's not really a problem to use them at nights - actually my boss does know this and is cool with it. Power is not an issue here :-D

Hey, if you and your boss have conspired to steal your employeer's power and you both can sleep at night, more power to you (no pun intended). No need for you to worry, the rest of us tax paying citizens will surely make up for the losses your company write's off each year.

cent

Yeah, awful idea.  As if Bitcoin needs any more bad press nowadays.  Last thing the movement needs is for press to hit that people's machines were being taken over for some strange thing called "Bitcoin" and doubling or tripling people's electric bills.

You are aware how much damn power the average American wastes, right? Assuming most people have low end shit machines with 320w PSUs, the power usage would be next to invisible. Fridges pull massive amounts of power, and most people have at least 2. So to say that it would triple their power bill is stupid.

If we assume the average computer in the BredoLab botnet (largest ever known) has a time-averaged hashing capacity of 10mhash/sec (very rough number considering the high end hardware/gaming market is a few percent, likely has an inverse correlation with botnet membership, and most zombies run at less than 100% uptime), then a botnet as a whole of that size could do around 300thash/sec, increasing hashing power by 5,000% and netting the botnet owner somewhere in the neighborhood of $11 million a day. (wrongly assuming this has NO effect on the exchange or difficulty rate)

This of course would give said botmaster a stranglehold on the bitcoin economy, he could monopolize generation by producing 98% of all blocks, he could hoard his coins to drive up prices.

The one thing he couldn't do is sell a large lot of them without crashing the market. Realistically moving anything upwards of a quarter million a day is going to have a large deflationary impact on the market in short order.

Feel free to check my math, but even a fairly small botnet could wreak havoc.

If using poclbm, use the flag -f120 or -f180

It will assign mining a super low priority in comparison to anything else that is requesting GPU resources.  I can game perfectly well with it on.  Dropd to about 40% of my hashing potential, and when idle i get about 3-5% lower hash.