idea: a bitcoin mining "botnet"- more effective than GPU mining?

[lechuck]

disclamimer: i use the term botnet to define a network of computers, i dont mean zombie pcs! nothing illegal here!
 

imagine a botnet of sorts or a couple thousand or even tens of thousands of pcs running a bitcoin miner in a pooled mode, each only using their cpus - lets say you could get 1Mh/s from most CPUs, how many "bots" would you need to have a decent hashrate? for example 1Ghs would require 1000 miner bots.

wouldnt that be much more effective then using expensive GPUs that use alot of power? basicalyl any recent CPU should be able to get 1Mhs easily.. you could even configure the mingers to only mine in idle mode.

I could imagine larger NGOs doing that, havng their supporters run the "mining bot" on their PCs to support a NGO or charity for instance

[lebuen]

This is nonsense. It's about efficiency - MHash/J. Of course you could mine with thousands of CPUs, but you would still pay more for the power than you'd ever get in BTC. A CPU isn't efficient enough for this task. Whether you mine with one or 5000 CPUs - the math doesn't change.

And: there's no such thing as "free electricity", someone's always paying the bills.

[lechuck]

why, people leave their computers on anyway? if I let my miner run CPU mining i can still work without problems but generate almost 3Mhs while doing so. why cant 1000 people do this?

[Man From The Future]

Almost all computers have power-saving - they odn't use as much energy when idle. So if you do this, you use more electricity. So it's probably pointless.

[detroit]

You're discounting the fact that CPUs (like GPUs) use more energy when they're working hard than when they're at idle.

It doesn't make financial sense to mine with 1 CPU because you spend more for the electricity than you'll get out of the coins, that won't change if you add a lot more CPUs.
A covert, virus-spread botnet would be effective for the creator because he's not paying for the electricity.

[Vladimir]

a bitcoin mining "botnet"- more effective than GPU mining?

Sure it is.... particularly when measured in jail time per BTC.   

[BkkCoins]

I could imagine larger NGOs doing that, havng their supporters run the "mining bot" on their PCs to support a NGO or charity for instance

They'd be better off just writing a check to the charity. It will cost them a lot less.

I've already calculated that the break even for mining is 0.25 MHs/W.

Using your example of 1 MHs per CPU it needs to use less than 4 Watts to break even.
Any more than that and you are losing money.

A 5770 doing 200 MH/s needs to use less than 800 Watts to break even.
That's where the profit is.

Now if you could get some gaming club / forum to all chip in with their unused GPU cycles to donate to charity then it would make sense.

[lechuck]

mh yea didnt realize CPU also use quite alot of Watts when in use..

[josephholsten]

Even if electricity was free, bandwidth isn't free either.

With bitp.it's javascript miner we were getting 700 requests per second. Sure we didn't have to pay for the browser electricity, but the bandwidth usage was insane.

tanstaafl

[Man From The Future]

Solution: wait until someoen writes something to allow one to not use JSON-RPC, stateless = bad for BW usage...

[OgNasty]

a bitcoin mining "botnet"- more effective than GPU mining?

Sure it is.... particularly when measured in jail time per BTC.   

Good one.

[joepie91]

Even if electricity was free, bandwidth isn't free either.

With bitp.it's javascript miner we were getting 700 requests per second. Sure we didn't have to pay for the browser electricity, but the bandwidth usage was insane.

tanstaafl

Where are you hosting/what is your host charging? I know that for example Hurricane Electric charges people colocating in their datacenter ~$1 / TB of traffic...  I can't imagine a bunch of javascript miners causing so much traffic that it would cost you a lot.