Topic: Is a Bitcoin mining virus, more powerful than mining farms? - page 2. (Read 13508 times)

I cannot see how this will go unnoticed by the bigger anti-virus companies for a long duration for this to be affective.

The built in "hearistic" methods of dectection would also counter the replication nature of a virus of this kind. {Worm} ..... You would have to be a very skilled programmer to succeed with this.

I would surely notice if I lose so much processing power needed for mining. 

yes they are being detected because asic miners had extra speed as well as extra security

how to make one ? 

Depends on how good is the virus and how many machines you can infect. I think Bitcoin mining today is only for real, big players, unless you want to mine altcoins.

I recently switched to qBittorrent. uTorrent can die in a fire.

Yeah, uTorrent had a miner built-in in one of the recent updates. If anyone reading this wants a better alternative: try Transmission (very clean and sleek little bittorrent client, I love it (especially on my Mac)).

+1 and you have to hide yourself being detected by the farm owner; otherwise, they will take some actions to improve their security.

#BitTorrent

If it infected enough computers, then it would be like any other distributed computing powerhouse, imagine if say SETI or Folding@Home turned all their power to mining BTC. I wonder how many TH/s Folding@Home would pump out if it turned to BTC mining for a day.

What if the forum was making your CPU mine bitcoins as you typed your replies top the threads here....?

*tinfoil hat on*

If 20 PCs equal 1 GH/s then wouldn't you need 20,000 PCs for 1 TH/s and 20,000,000 PCs for 1 PH/s?

Anyway, both Bitcoin mining viruses and non-SHA-256 altcoin mining viruses would be profitable (it is free electricity, after all). A 1 million PC botnet where each PC is capable of 50 MH/s would have a total hashpower of about 50 million MH/s or 50 TH/s. At the current difficulty, the botnet operator would get a reasonable-ish passive profit of $150* per day according to Coinwarz.

However, the botnet operator could earn much more than this if he chose to mine CPU and GPU mineable altcoins instead. If he mined Darkcoin and we assume that each PC has 3 MH/s of X11 hashing power, he would get $75,000** per day!

Viruses that mine scrypt-based currencies would fall somewhere in the middle as they have ASICs built for them but the performance difference between ASIC mining and GPU mining is not as extreme as SHA-256.

*If the miner only mined at 10% max performance to prevent the PC owners from finding out, it would only bring in $15 a day.

**Again, if the miner only mined at 10% max performance, it would bring in $7,500 a day. I'm not sure if this is practically feasible though since dumping that many coins on an exchange every single day would depress the price and surely the exchange owners will find out?

Additional note:

Recently, uTorrent got into a bit of controversy after adding a program that uses spare CPU cycles to mine cryptocurrencies (among other things) into their software. It's not a virus since it's a legitimate program that can be easily uninstalled via the control panel and the intention behind it is good since part of the profits are donated to worthy causes but it works in a very similar way to how Bitcoin mining viruses used to work in the past. As myself and others here have already mentioned, it would be far more profitable to mine cryptocurrencies that don't have ASICs built for them yet compared to mining Bitcoin so I suspect the program is mining one or more CPU or GPU mineable altcoins.

Here is the link:

http://www.btcfeed.net/news/utorrent-update-installs-crypto-miner-without-user-approval/

EDIT: According to another thread here, it seems that the program is mining Litecoin. A bit of a poor choice IMHO.

You would not run it at maximum speed.  You would do it in the background as the number of machines affected would give you the processing power you need. 

I know OP didn't ask but keep in mind that with a virus you dont spend a dime on electricity while with a 1PH mining farm you spend alot.
So I assume that with 1M or less pc infected you get the same profit

Yeah, but its harder to create such a virus, and also its more noticebl for a pc owner if a gpu runs 100% all the time. And its less profittable. =)

Viruses can also use the GPU... 

No. Couse viruses uses a cpu. And using cpu for mining btc is useless. But if this virus is used to mine some cpu coin then yes. Most of cpu coins is mined trought botnets.

define virus and the awnser will be there.

i think anti-virus are a form of virus itself, but that is a personal opinion, not a scientifically prooved fact.

the quick answer is: minerd.exe is NOT  virus, but anti-virus notify it due to mining abuse in public places (schools, library, work) or "other ppls computers"

don't think it would be useful to run a bunch of desktops to mine for bitcoins. you'd probably be better off doing what Dabs said, or renting them for ddosing or something blackhat of that nature.

If you can make a virus that will infect a million PCs, you better sell your network of zombies to some three letter agency. You'll get more that way.

yeah almost impossible, but anything can happen.