Bitcoin Forum

Theoretically, a trojan that connects itself to a pool and cpu mines at say 8mhs is pointless... but suddenly if you have 1000 people as part of this trojan, you suddenly have 8ghs which is very high.... can you guys see small miners being pushed out by trojans?

they already have been put out, although at the moment they use already established pools (like deep bit) that already have in built protection against many IP connections (like botnets/Trojans).
However, they can still run a mining server themselves to generate the coins, but they would require MUCH more power before they can get a steady income.
At the moment, and for the foreseeable future, its unprofitable.

how would they distinguish between a botnet connecting through guiminer and a legit worker connection through guiminer?

Multiple IP's from across the country / world ;D

Think about, a typical miner may have say 2 - 5 IP's they may be coming from, mining from the house, co-lo, work, friends, family, etc.

When a pool sees IP's from around the world or across a nation red flags get raised. Some pool's like slush you have to white list the IPs from where your miners are coming from. Its a long list if you have a botnet and have to gather the IP's and white list them all.. also again the admins will notice why an account has like 50 different IP's from across a nation or the world.

In the event that say a college or organization that has a static block of IP's I suppose its possible to stay under the radar but eventually someone will notice something wrong with their PC. Especially if your CPU mining its very intensive from what I have read and for GPU mining how many organizations have decent video cards that people won't notice is lagging their gaming or work.

At the moment you would need about 30GH/s to get approx. 1 block a day or 50 btc a day.
With how difficult it is to install opencl with an unattended installation, most botnets would be using CPU mining on their bots, probably getting 1 MH/s a pop

to get 30GH/s, or 30,000MH/s, a botnet owner would need (rather obvious now) 30,000 bots running a miner to start getting a steady income (with a mining server all their own). Not only that, but 30,000 connections is a bit much for a standard server, so the owner would require a massive server just to manage all the shares.

Until someone figures out a way to harness GPU power without complex opencl installations, it just isn't feasible. (unless of course the owner used an already mining pool that doesnt require registration, and then send all the coins to himself, but thats just ABSURD  ;D )

I think this is less and less a possibility as mining/Verifying becomes a more and more specialized process

tbh I believe this is completely possible... applications can detect the graphics hardware and then act accordingly eg if a ati card exists run this, if navidia run this, else do this.... the other day I was CPU mining and GUI miner was saying 100mhs which is high for a CPU.... I still believe bitcoin is going to be destroyed by Trojans etc

personally I believe if a Trojan programmer was able to harness a GPU easily and automatically then mining will definitely become much more difficult, but at the moment its a non-option

For now.....  :-[

what if I said I had such a program right now? I made it to send to my remote server and other computers I couldn't physically interact with... all of these belong to me

I personally don't see how condoms will ever come to influence the bitcoin game.

condoms?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_%28condoms%29

Trojan is a brand name of condoms manufactured by the Church & Dwight Company. 70.5 percent of condoms purchased in United States drugstores are Trojan contraceptives.

The problem with the matter is that the value of a single infected PC has gone up now. Sending spam mails is probably much less lucrative than mining bitcoins. I think the incentive is definitely set towards mining. But that need not be a problem for the rest of us at all.

yea good point, only time will tell in the end :)

there is no such thing as security by obscurity, if people need to trust a minning soft they need to release the source so everyone will be sure they are not about stealing your wallet.