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.
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.