And just to add this one thoughtt:
I have seen the argument multiple times on here that anyone who had possession of a million man botnet would be much better served using it for other purposes (IE make money). But I must argue that since most data and real world evidence supports the fact that most botnets are used solely for DDOS and other, hardly profitable endeavors, and most certainly not against the big scary banks, this just doesn't hold any water, IMO. IMO botnets most profitable option is to be a mining botnet.
Am I right on here or totally off?
lolz
u are so dead wrong. I make about €15 a day from 7 computers that each do have <250mhz. I won't tell how, because I won't make that money then anymore, however, I hardly can imagine that those computers could find enough BTC per day to break even with the other incomes.
@Palmdetroit - I actually stated the possibility of Governments/Banks/Criminals putting much hash power into the network and possible countermeasures into the dev section on this board. everything was ruled out to be "unlikely and too fraud-enabling".
Actually increasing the network hash rate by a factor of 10(which is still in range of government/scientific supercomputing), they could effectively drive up difficulty by a matter of less than a day, and the network would need (without any miners quitting because of this, so it would even take longer in practical terms) over three months to get to the next 2016th block for difficulty to be recalculated.