The other clever bit is that with the drop reward cut looming, it will ensure a pool of mining for the long term.
Exactly, well put. Sustained mining is, of course, critical to the longevity of Bitcoin. Providing external incentive to run mining processes (such as the CoinLab model) for transaction fees could ensure a healthy distributed base of miners, even after the generation reward dwindles.
Since the reward for mining with CoinLab is tied to in-game credits/perks, the two economies (in-game digital goods and Bitcoin itself) can be scaled independently. That is, even if transaction fee "mining" earns fewer Bitcoin value than today's generation reward, this doesn't strictly mean that the in-game perks are reduced; the two are independent, and gamers still have an incentive to run the CoinLab mining software.
I thought the same thing.
On the other hand, botnet are probably making some money out of the computers they infect and use to mine, since they don't pay for the electricity.
What I mean is that, maybe CoinLab miners (the gamers) will be spending more electricity on their mining than what CoinLab will generate of revenues, but CoinLab doesn't care, as they are not paying the bill. And the gamers probably don't care that much either, all they want is to play for "free" - actually, they would be tricking themselves or their parents into believing this is free. I don't know how far can this "lie" goes on, though. Once people figure it out, they would probably rather pay directly per time of game. That would be less expensive to the gamers and more profitable to the game companies.
As I was responding above, you hit on exactly my point of the two economies. Gamers want to earn in-game perks, and the pure Bitcoin value of what their mining doesn't directly matter to them.
I would tend to believe that, even if gamers are told up front about the electricity cost, that they'd still get behind running the CoinLab mining software to earn "free" perks, just because it gives their gaming rig something cool to do.
Legal botnet FTW.
Agreed. Seems like a voluntarily installed botnet to me.
This is a good example of one primary point of the CoinLab article (original post). A major hurdle to starting a Bitcoin-related business is the stigma of the Bitcoin "brand." Just because users install and run distributed computing software doesn't make it a botnet. I used to run SETI@Home (and prime number factoring, etc) just because I want my computer to be doing something interesting when I'm not utilizing it. This does not a botnet make.
