I disagree. One would be crazy to point all bots to a single ip. Your server won't be able to handle all those connections. It's totally reasonable to combine a few thousands of them.
Seriously, where did you learn logic? That makes little to no sense... If you're running a mining botnet, that hashing ultimately has to all be directed somewhere. Some server is handling it, it is no less reasonable that a botnet operator would run a server to organize their mining power and fetch work from pools then just directing your drones directly at a pool - there is a single point handling everything either way.
And you are talking about "this person". If it was a GPU farm, there is no way for a single person to handle all those GPUs. You will have more dead fans a day than you will be able to replace. You need dozens of people to run such a farm. Considering the amount of work to build such a farm, hire the people to manage all those rigs, dealing with electricity and so on... this is an investment if at least 5 mil. USD. And with that amount of money, it's totally lame to point all your rigs to a pool of a hobbyist (no offense - you are doing great work!). Creating a multipool just for yourself is not that complicated. Investing 5 mil. USD in a mining farm and not paying 50K USD to a software developer is very unlikely to happen. :-)
You seem to be talking about consumer hardware, which makes little sense. A key point poolwaffle made was regarding economies of scale - it would certainly not be 5mil USD, probably nowhere close. Imagine a factory that produces Sapphire cards deciding to direct their high-binned chips to a special production line that makes equipment for mining for themselves. Based on how much R9 290 chips were going for before this crazy mining craze (which means they would still be available at those prices in bulk if you have the right contacts), a farm like this could easily be built for under $2 million - and that's presuming it isn't an ODM just re-purposing their production line or something.
Furthermore, creating an effective multipool with excellent switching is damn complicated... if you're in the hardware industry, that doesn't mean you have great connections to the software industry. And that money spent on a software developer would probably be better spent on firmware development to optimize your card BIOS for mining. Why not offload the pool management and coin switching work to someone like poolwaffle for a measly 1% fee? That seems perfectly reasonable to me.
My suggestion: ask the operator to contact you via PM and, of course, handle all communication confidential. It's should be easy for him to provide some evidence that this is just a ultra-large GPU farm.
Ultimately, I think this is none of our business. We aren't asking you anyone else for proof that they are not running a botnet, why would that be different for someone with a few magnitudes more hashing power?
The top miner currently provides 6.10 GH/s... This clearly seems to be a botnet. I know that this give you a lot of coins, but nevertheless - most pools try to lock out botnets, because it's not only a crime, but also a huge waste of energy.
We are a large ASIC + GPU farm, no botnets.
If botnets, Hashrate will up and down when people turn on and shut down they computer.
But we Hashrate is stable
Ah there is sfire. Good stuff. Hope that resolves this conversation once and for-all. I had a feeling it was him - refer to his post history for the hints he dropped about their operation in the MC thread.
