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]If the cpu coin is widespread enough to drive sufficient demand, the price of Botnets will simply rise to match their hardware cost. They aren't unlimited in supply. Botnets compete for the same computers that users will want to use to mine with. No problem really if thinking big, only while small it is a threat.
Cloud computing won't have too much of an advantage, only the economies-of-scale on electricity mostly, but the wise small-scale miner can locate with microhydropower to beat them and the home miner doesn't care about electricity cost. The Tilera CPUs won't compete. If you mean admins hijacking their company servers to use their downtime, this is just a form of Botnet.
Also the word will get out. People will start reclaiming their computers from hijackers. Thus driving the price of Botnets up further.
In the near-term, the botnets won't have the right CPUs in most machines, so they will run inefficiently, something like an order-of-magnitude less than a recent Haswell.
Also the value of the coin scales to the value of the mining network, so if home users drive difficulty to the moon (because the electricity cost isn't significant compared to other appliances), they will also drive the price of the coin to the moon.
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The problem in my mind is wealth allocation. When talking about decentralization - I think in terms of decentralization of power and release of new funds. If the price of botnets rise. Then isn't the wealth being released to those who own the botnets. Granted - it might be he who winds up with the coin is purchasing the botnet. So in reality he's just getting a good deal on amazon instances.
So really. AWS, botnets, borrowing my companies resources are all the same issue. Perhaps you are right on the generation of processors. As botnets tend to be much older computers.
My opinion is still that hard drive space and memory as a requirements would help with the botnet issue, the farming issue (the cost of mining each coin mass produced would be closer to the cost of what the general public already owns - vs just a fraction of it (processor).
I would LOVE to get behind a anonymous CPU only coin. And honestly I think there are many who are on board with the idea of bitcoin or various alts who would feel the same. Who are invested with the idea - but a little disenchanted with the massive centralization.