= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
gwern comments on Why you should consider buying Bitcoin right now (Jan 2015) if you have high risk tolerance - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (136)
How much does a botnet cost?
I've given estimates in some of my other comments, and you can find them in the academic literature, or Brian Krebs's Spam Nation, as to how much it costs to rent a botnet. If you run them through a mining difficulty calculator, the income from mining will be trivial at this point and you will wipe out any gains by greater attrition of your botnet. You'll be much better off using them to send spam, display scareware to users, and ransack personal data. (And this is assuming you could get the highly heterogenous computers of the botnet to all run GPU mining, which is quite a feat on its own.)
You need to account costs of getting caught. Botnets are easily create and maintained fairly anonymously, but renting them out means taking money, and spamming means having customers and sales, all of which increase your chance of getting caught doing something illegal. Doing computational proof of work for electronic cash is very low risk, and at the peak of BitCoin pricing a lot of the hacked servers were being used for BitCoin mining.
Even if you were able to bust a botnet which is mining bitcoins, compared to credit card fraud, bank fraud, this is going to be bottom of your priorities - at least till those setting the priorities own a shed load of BitCoins.
Botnets are often not heterogenous, sure you don't guarantee graphics cards, but most of those I saw were webservers hacked using the same small set of exploits, or same sets of default credentials.
Botnet operators hardly ever get caught.
Cite please. I was paying close attention during the boom to, among other things, the (non)use of botnets for Bitcoin mining, and I saw next to zero evidence of nontrivial usage.
Aren't botnets primarily home computers or routers?