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nazgulnarsil comments on General Bitcoin discussion thread (June 2011) - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: SilasBarta 10 June 2011 11:21PM

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Comment author: nazgulnarsil 11 June 2011 05:23:06AM *  0 points [-]

Just got my second card running a few hours ago. If it all goes bust at least it will have been an entertaining ride.

Building a mining rig is no longer that attractive with the price doubling for the video cards that are good at it.

edit: looks like you can still build a 1Gh rig for $800 with a payoff time of <30 days presuming power is cheap and price/difficulty doesnt drop too hard.

Comment author: David_Gerard 11 June 2011 08:51:14PM *  3 points [-]

How long before the botnet operators start mining? I've yet to see an advocate mention the botnet operators - maybe I've missed something. Is there some reason bitcoin mining isn't susceptible to botnetting?

Comment author: saturn 12 June 2011 12:28:36AM 7 points [-]

Here's one plausible reason. The average PC without a top-of-the-line GPU is very slow at mining, botnet operators can make quite a lot of money with good old extortion and spam, and pegging the CPU all the time will prompt some victims to get their computers disinfected or replaced more quickly than they would have otherwise.

Comment author: gwern 12 June 2011 09:53:04PM 0 points [-]

The average PC without a top-of-the-line GPU is very slow at mining,

Numbers are available. The ratio is GPUs are something like 150x a CPU (going full blast). Botnets are large, but a 150 or 300x difference is hard to make up given how many GPU miners there already are.

(This is not to say that a botnet might not make good money doing normal miners, but it's not really something to worry about.)