What worries me is that if ransomware virus could own money, it could pay some human to install itself on others people computers, and also pay programmers for finding new exploits and even for the improvement of the virus.
But for such development legal personhood is not needed, only illegal.
Malware developers already invest in R&D and buying exploits; I’m not sure what key difference it makes whether the malware or its owners does the investing.
It makes me worry because it looks like Seed AI with clearly non-human goals.
The difference between current malware developers may be subtle, but it may grow after some threshold of such narrow AI virus. You can’t turn off the virus, but malware creators are localised and could be caught. They also share most human values with other humans and will stop at some level of possible destruction.
I don’t think this would work. This requires some way for it to keep the human it has entrusted with editing its programing from modifying it to simply send him all the money it acquires.
The human has to leave part of the money with the virus, as the virus needs to pay for installing its ransomware and for other services. If the human takes all money, the virus will be noneffective and will not so quickly replicate. Thus some form of natural selection will help viruses that give only part of their money (and future revenues) for programmers in exchange for modification.
You need to earn minimum amounts before you can receive a payout share or, worse, solo mine a block. With the asymmetric advantage provided by optimized hardware, your expectation time for finding enough shares to earn a payout using cpu mining is in the centuries to millenniums timeframe. This is without considering rising fees that raise the bar even higher.
What with the way the ASIC mining chips keep upping the difficulty, can a CPU botnet even pay for the developer’s time to code the worm that spreads it any more?
Um, no it hasn’t. Not in bitcoin. Botnets had an effect in the early days, but the only ones around in this asic age are lingering zombie botnets that are still mining only because no one bothered to turn them off.
The difficulty keeps going up, but so does the Bitcoin price (at least recently) :-) Plus there are now other cryptocurrencies you can mine (e.g. Ethereum) with different proofs-of-work.
What worries me is that if ransomware virus could own money, it could pay some human to install itself on others people computers, and also pay programmers for finding new exploits and even for the improvement of the virus.
But for such development legal personhood is not needed, only illegal.
Malware developers already invest in R&D and buying exploits; I’m not sure what key difference it makes whether the malware or its owners does the investing.
It makes me worry because it looks like Seed AI with clearly non-human goals.
The difference between current malware developers may be subtle, but it may grow after some threshold of such narrow AI virus. You can’t turn off the virus, but malware creators are localised and could be caught. They also share most human values with other humans and will stop at some level of possible destruction.
I don’t think this would work. This requires some way for it to keep the human it has entrusted with editing its programing from modifying it to simply send him all the money it acquires.
The human has to leave part of the money with the virus, as the virus needs to pay for installing its ransomware and for other services. If the human takes all money, the virus will be noneffective and will not so quickly replicate. Thus some form of natural selection will help viruses that give only part of their money (and future revenues) for programmers in exchange for modification.
With bitcoin botnet mining this was briefly possible. Also see “google eats itself.”
I don’t think this could work. Where would the virus keep its private key?
On a central command and control server it owns, and pays bitcoin to maintain.
Ok, so where does it store the administrator password to said server?
It … doesn’t? That’s where it works from. No external access.
why “was briefly possible”? - Was the botnet closed?
They may be referring to the fact that bitcoin mining is unprofitable on most people’s computers.
It is profitable for a botnet—that is, if someone else pays for electricity.
You need to earn minimum amounts before you can receive a payout share or, worse, solo mine a block. With the asymmetric advantage provided by optimized hardware, your expectation time for finding enough shares to earn a payout using cpu mining is in the centuries to millenniums timeframe. This is without considering rising fees that raise the bar even higher.
What with the way the ASIC mining chips keep upping the difficulty, can a CPU botnet even pay for the developer’s time to code the worm that spreads it any more?
It’s already happening via market mechanisms.
Um, no it hasn’t. Not in bitcoin. Botnets had an effect in the early days, but the only ones around in this asic age are lingering zombie botnets that are still mining only because no one bothered to turn them off.
The difficulty keeps going up, but so does the Bitcoin price (at least recently) :-) Plus there are now other cryptocurrencies you can mine (e.g. Ethereum) with different proofs-of-work.
The difficulty has gone up 12 orders of magnitude. The bitcoin price hasn’t had that good of a return.