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You don't need to drive out all honest mining. All you need is not to have to pay for any costs. The issue he's pointing out is that the rational, amoral actor

by cscheid 13y ago

You don't need to drive out all honest mining. All you need is not to have to pay for any costs. The issue he's pointing out is that the rational, amoral actor will have to decide between a saturated market of ASICs with extremely long time to ROI, and a quick buck off of grandma's draining laptop battery.

nathas 13y ago
The problem is that the difficult rate increases based on the hashing power put into the network, and the reward for mining is cut in half as more coins are mined until there are none left. http://www.bitcoindifficulty.com/ http://www.bitcoindifficulty.com/ You'd need a LOT of regular PCs to match even one simple asic. A butterfly lab's jalapeno does ~5 gigahash/sec. You'd have to infest 500 decent PCs to achieve that, and then wait about a month for about a tenth of a bitcoin. So to get 1 btc in a month, you'd need to infect 5k PCs without them noticing that "damn, my machine is really pegged" and "golly, this laptop is awfully hot and my battery dies really fast...". It has happened, but realistically you could just buy a miner and be done with it. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/07/botcoin-bitcoin-mining-by-botnet/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/07/botcoin-bitcoin-mining-b... They were able to get ~240 machines, at a time when CPU mining was making them ~$350/day. Decent, but worth all the time to write the software and distribute it? Eh, probably not.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
maxerickson 13y ago
A pegged CPU or GPU is pretty noticeable. Illicit mining has to be the best use of the access (instead of say, stealing $0.01 from an ad network or whatever).
gabemart 13y ago
> The issue he's pointing out is that the rational, amoral actor will have to decide between a saturated market of ASICs with extremely long time to ROI, and a quick buck off of grandma's draining laptop battery. The rational, amoral actor with access to a botnet of general-purpose machines will have to decide between using them to mine for BTC and using them for another profitable, illegal purpose, such as relaying spam, performing DDOS attacks etc. As the difficulty of mining increases, the profitability of mining on a botnet decreases relative to the other potential uses for the botnet. Currently, I would be surprised if mining for BTC on home computers would yield enough coin to pay even for the cost of building the botnet in the first place.
drzaiusapelord 13y ago
This is correct. Last friday one of our LAMP servers was running a litecoin miner via a security vulernability. Everyone laughed at how inefficient that would be for the hacker. Well, the hacker wrote a script and probably got tens of thousands of high powered VMs to do his bidding. Free mining for him. Even if its crazy inefficient, 10k inefficient machines are better than spending $5,000 on a single mining rig. Whatever he makes via this approach is pure profit. Note: if you run Pydio, update to the newest version. Everything below 5.04 has a serious security vulnerability. That's how they got into our machine.
- makomk 13y ago
  Litecoin != Bitcoin. My argument doesn't apply to Litecoin, because by design it doesn't have the same vast disparity between the performance of the best available mining hardware and your average PC. In fact, if anything Litecoin is another reason why botnet miners are unlikely to drive out professional Bitcoin mining - it's much more profitable to mine Litecoin.
  - drzaiusapelord 13y ago
    They're both nearly identical cryptocurrencies with a lot of the very same problems. > it's much more profitable to mine Litecoin. Only because its younger than bitcoin. Making bitcoins was trivial a couple years ago. Considering both have a maximum number of coins, this dicussion is academic. Once that max is hit then its just traded as any ugly market commodity.
    - redthrowaway 13y ago
      Litecoin uses scrypt, a memory-intensive hashing function, whereas BtC uses SHA, which is merely computationally expensive. It was specifically designed to be difficult to mine with ASICs, so as to lessen the advantages of professional ASIC mining farms and give relative power back to all the guys who built GPU mining rigs back when that was cutting-edge. The unfortunate side-effect of this is that LtC botnets are far more viable relative to the total network hashrate than BtC botnets, as the difference in power between commodity computers and ASICs as far as hashing is concerned is far less for LtC than BtC.
baddox 13y ago
Why is this a prediction for the future, or in other words, why does this appear not to be happening now? We've seen three generations of Bitcoin mining (CPU, GPU, and ASIC), and at all times it appears that parasitic mining has been an extremely small portion of the mining network. And ASICs, capital intense though they may be, have been developed and purchased en masse by your "rational, amoral actors."

by cscheid 13y ago

nathas 13y ago

The problem is that the difficult rate increases based on the hashing power put into the network, and the reward for mining is cut in half as more coins are mined until there are none left. http://www.bitcoindifficulty.com/ http://www.bitcoindifficulty.com/ You'd need a LOT of regular PCs to match even one simple asic. A butterfly lab's jalapeno does ~5 gigahash/sec. You'd have to infest 500 decent PCs to achieve that, and then wait about a month for about a tenth of a bitcoin. So to get 1 btc in a month, you'd need to infect 5k PCs without them noticing that "damn, my machine is really pegged" and "golly, this laptop is awfully hot and my battery dies really fast...". It has happened, but realistically you could just buy a miner and be done with it. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/07/botcoin-bitcoin-mining-by-botnet/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/07/botcoin-bitcoin-mining-b... They were able to get ~240 machines, at a time when CPU mining was making them ~$350/day. Decent, but worth all the time to write the software and distribute it? Eh, probably not.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

maxerickson 13y ago

A pegged CPU or GPU is pretty noticeable. Illicit mining has to be the best use of the access (instead of say, stealing $0.01 from an ad network or whatever).

gabemart 13y ago

> The issue he's pointing out is that the rational, amoral actor will have to decide between a saturated market of ASICs with extremely long time to ROI, and a quick buck off of grandma's draining laptop battery. The rational, amoral actor with access to a botnet of general-purpose machines will have to decide between using them to mine for BTC and using them for another profitable, illegal purpose, such as relaying spam, performing DDOS attacks etc. As the difficulty of mining increases, the profitability of mining on a botnet decreases relative to the other potential uses for the botnet. Currently, I would be surprised if mining for BTC on home computers would yield enough coin to pay even for the cost of building the botnet in the first place.

drzaiusapelord 13y ago

This is correct. Last friday one of our LAMP servers was running a litecoin miner via a security vulernability. Everyone laughed at how inefficient that would be for the hacker. Well, the hacker wrote a script and probably got tens of thousands of high powered VMs to do his bidding. Free mining for him. Even if its crazy inefficient, 10k inefficient machines are better than spending $5,000 on a single mining rig. Whatever he makes via this approach is pure profit. Note: if you run Pydio, update to the newest version. Everything below 5.04 has a serious security vulnerability. That's how they got into our machine.

makomk 13y ago
Litecoin != Bitcoin. My argument doesn't apply to Litecoin, because by design it doesn't have the same vast disparity between the performance of the best available mining hardware and your average PC. In fact, if anything Litecoin is another reason why botnet miners are unlikely to drive out professional Bitcoin mining - it's much more profitable to mine Litecoin.
- drzaiusapelord 13y ago
  They're both nearly identical cryptocurrencies with a lot of the very same problems. > it's much more profitable to mine Litecoin. Only because its younger than bitcoin. Making bitcoins was trivial a couple years ago. Considering both have a maximum number of coins, this dicussion is academic. Once that max is hit then its just traded as any ugly market commodity.
  - redthrowaway 13y ago
    Litecoin uses scrypt, a memory-intensive hashing function, whereas BtC uses SHA, which is merely computationally expensive. It was specifically designed to be difficult to mine with ASICs, so as to lessen the advantages of professional ASIC mining farms and give relative power back to all the guys who built GPU mining rigs back when that was cutting-edge. The unfortunate side-effect of this is that LtC botnets are far more viable relative to the total network hashrate than BtC botnets, as the difference in power between commodity computers and ASICs as far as hashing is concerned is far less for LtC than BtC.

baddox 13y ago

Why is this a prediction for the future, or in other words, why does this appear not to be happening now? We've seen three generations of Bitcoin mining (CPU, GPU, and ASIC), and at all times it appears that parasitic mining has been an extremely small portion of the mining network. And ASICs, capital intense though they may be, have been developed and purchased en masse by your "rational, amoral actors."