SimonW

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... (read more)

I thought Bitcoins were a proof of work thing, with a limited total number, so the rate of mining changes over time and in response to the price, or has that changed?

When I lasted looked mining on your own electricity bill was madness, but botnets were being used to mine, and had sufficient benefits in being easy to convert that the botnet operators were preferring bitcoin mining over riskier endeavours.

Surely this is just a risk calculation, and depends on many factors.

Currently debt is cheap, so high risk, high return investments make some sense if the expectation is good.

Paying down debt if it is cheap is a silly mistake.

You can still make good returns on the stock market betting that the market is risk averse, we have feeble brains.

Currently the cash you have is probably denominated in a conventional currency which also carries risk, we just tend to assume our own currency is some sort of fix point.

I'll probably have had been buying bitcoins if my we... (read more)