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David_Gerard comments on General Bitcoin discussion thread (June 2011) - Less Wrong Discussion
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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?
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.
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.)