Botnets are to Bitcoin, what GPUs were to Bitcoin 9 months ago

[Jack of Diamonds]

All the important points were already posted in this thread & before if you just bothered to search.

Point in case: Very few infected machines have any harvestable GPU's. The vast majority are compromised Windows 98 and Windows XP SP1 machines that are 5-10 years old and run without any sort of antivirus or firewalls.

However, many of them have modern internet connection speeds such as 1mb/s or even 10mb/s+. This makes them very valuable for denial of service attack & extortion business.

If you have constant strain on old CPU's, even computer illiterate people will start noticing & you will potentially lose parts of your botnet for no reason at all.

Is it worth it for the 0.5mhash/s you would get from an average machine with a Sempron?
No. Simply put, utilizing a botnet for bitcoin mining is a waste of money at this point (machines in botnets are each worth a monetary amount, plus opportunity cost as mentioned above).

It should have been utilized when difficulty was in the 4-5 numbers. Remote installing miners on all your machines at 1m+ difficulty is a stupid business plan considering how much more you could earn just by renting out those machines.

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[rahl]

The fact that you think there are 20-50 botnets with over a million bots, shows that you don't know what the fuck you are talking about.

The incentives are just too high.  1,000,000 infected computers (not hard to achieve at all with a Botnet, in reality the more successful Botnets have 10 million or more) will drive the difficulty through the roof!!!

This cements you as an idiot.  How many botnets do you think in the history of computing have had over a million bots?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet#Historical_List_of_Botnets

I don't know anything about this but I can still tell this is nonsense. I don't know exactly what those existing botnets do but I am pretty sure they are about as intrusive as .bat loop with a ping command running in the background...

When you start mining on someone computer they will notice. It will be hot, noisy and slow. It is enough for most people to have there computer looked at. Or they will just buy a new computer, yes there are loads of people that just go and buy a new computer because the one they have is slowed down by malware...

Anyway those computers would be wiped or replaced much much faster then current botnets.

[Stevenrm87]

So what have we learned so far? 2 years later

[Bitsaurus]

So what have we learned so far? 2 years later

We learned that no matter how irrelevant an old topic is somebody will dredge it up 

[batman, not crabman]

That's nothing, I just shut down my 100 GHash/sec array because it kept filling my attack zepplin with too much hot air - and I don't have oxygen bottles plentiful enough to keep cabin pressure going. That'll put a dent in my party plans, nobody likes to be a sick guest aboard a luxury airship.

Please, if you are in your underground volcano lair, just pull the thermocouples from the hot magma and stop mining, it's going to get someone hurt.

Genius

Also what's with all the overreaction?  If mining is profitable right now but may not be in X months then just keep mining for another X months and shut down then. WTF, so simple.

[tom_o]

So what have we learned so far? 2 years later

We learned that no matter how irrelevant an old topic is somebody will dredge it up 

And that someone created his own, bitcoin specific botnet aimed at people with high end graphics cards.


http://kotaku.com/e-sports-league-mined-bitcoins-with-subscribers-comput-486205191

ESEA League, one of the largest PC gaming leagues, has admitted to putting code into the league's client software to "mine" bitcoins, the open-source Internet currency now exchanging for around $130 per. The league is offering free memberships as some members complain the code damaged their video cards.