Topic: Mining will become controlled by botnets (Read 4146 times)

Let me write you a fictional story.

Two online friends in their twenties own a 500k botnet we will call BotX, pretty secure and well run operation with lots of contacts ranging from Russian stock pump & dump, Nigerian banks, health products, DDOS contracts, you name it. BotX is running 90% of the time, anything from 5day to 20day prepaid contracts. Our two friends are in Vancouver Canada where they got a $1500 per day for a Nigerian bank letters that they will run for a week. Before the week is up, they get a call from their old Russian friend Sergey who is in NYC running a stock pump and dump ring. Sergey is what they called a whale. Big customer, he contracts BotX for longer periods, this time it will be $3k per day for 50 days, so $150k. Our friends are happy and they are ready to leave for NYC. Sergey sends $75k to their Cayman bank account and sets them up in a nice apartment where they will stay for the time of the campaign. Everything is up and running and they call Sergey how things are on his end if he is happy with the results and everything. They meet in NYC night club where everything is taking care of by Sergeys people, from drinks & food to girls or drugs or whatever comes to your mind. Everyone is happy and having a time of their life. Campaign is over money was paid, and because everyone was so good to our two friends they throw in extra few days of the campaign for free. Everyone is happy ( very important part of this fictional story ). Our two friends are now on their way to Europe to set up a new campaign for some dietary product. In the last 3 months they banked $200k and had a blast.


Now the bitcoin story. Same two guys and their 500k BotX. Mining bitcoins, taking care to transfer all this bits, try to get numerous accounts on all this newbie run exchanges, only able to withdraw $10k per month. They are sitting in their apartment doing jack nothing, except thinking how actually stupid this whole idea was and thinking how much better it would be if they would party it up with some playboy models in LA, drinking stupidly expensive Crystal from bottles and getting messed up on the weekends. They used to call those weekends MISSIONS, they bond like no other during those crazy weekends. Now they rather sit in their apartment and collect bitcoins. They could go out and maybe try to have fun, but they don't know anyone, they can't get into the clubs for free or score some models. Why not? They just two computer guys mining bitcoins. Noone needs those except junkies who wants to buy their fix on Silkroad, everyone else at the moment is speculating they will go up in value so they can take their profits, leaving some fool who bought it at $32 to hold the bag and hoping he will get his $5k back anytime soon.

Our two friends and their BotX will stick to what they been doing for years and let us mine the coins.

I'm new here so bear with me any rookie mistake I will make by making up a few assumptions I've got so far (I'm also no programmer).

How can botnets be not worth it for someone who can do it when it comes to mining btcs? It's an investment. Sure, it's more stable money running a spam or DDoS service it seems but what about the rise in BTC's worth?

I guess I should apologize, I don't mean to be arguing for botnets dominating bitcoin. I actually do not expect them to make much of an impact. Most botnets are used to run spam-mail or DDoS or whatnot, they are very difficult to shutdown, fairly secure business, and very profitable.

Bitcoin on the otherhand is a new, difficult to implement program, that is risky for the operator in terms of losing machines as well as introduces a lot of hurdles and hassles in terms of "cashing out" (collecting bitcoins, turning bitcoins into moolah, pulling that moolah out somewhere), as well as being a somewhat unstable platform for making money (variable pricing, variable difficulty, etc.)

For now botnet operators trying to get into bitcoin are rare, and likely they will be blocked from pools because they are small, and somewhat risky to allow to operate. I don't foresee them becoming a huge problem, but they COULD in theory, and in that scenario people will bow to the dollar. That was my only point.

For the near-term future GPU miners will dominate bitcoin. In the future ASICs and botnets could step in and mess things up, but that is a ways away in the future, and we'll have to see where bitcoin stands at that point anyway.

Any serious botnet owner can get better deals for their botnet then bother with bitcoins. Back in the viagra boom era.. they could get anything up to $20k per day. Today spam is worth $2k per day and $500 for DDOS for a decent size botnet.

Since GPU isn't easy to access and get everything running the right way, botnets would probably mine with under 20% CPU. You would need a big botnet to be worth it, if you are good enough to run a big bonet you can get a better deal for it.


Will there be a botnet miner ? Yes.
Will it run long and mine much? No.

I'm beginning to think botnet operators might ruin fun for all honest folks if they going to persist with their initiatives without any repercussions .  not because of overpowering. but because whole bitcoin thing may become associated with it and then all of a sudden gray becomes really dark and illegal.

Yes, it was indeed. And I'm not talking about running botnets, that's clearly illegal, and not a gray area. Having a server which is running a program serving thousands of people, that a botnet chooses to pick up on and contribute to, completely without solicitation, contact or connection with the operator of the botnet is not clearly illegal. Hence it is a gray area. Not that hard to understand.

And if it means the difference between gaining or losing hundreds, or even thousands of dollars PER DAY there is a hell of a lot of incentive for a pool operator to bet on gray.

the gray area you mentioned in other post above was referring to bitcoin as whole .. and you compare bitcoin which is gray area with profiting from botnets  - this is apples and oranges.

If you set up an operation solely to profit from a botnet, that certainly would be a problem, if you have an established pool serving tens of thousands of users and a botnet happens to drop in, how are you culpable? If there are 2 websites serving popular widgets, and a botnet happens to DDoS the crap out of 1, leaving the other to solely profit from the misfortune of the first, by your logic that person will be part of the botnet, because they are "profiting from botnet operation."

Again, cite some precedent or stop just filling up the space with your rampant fears with no basis. Authorities don't just kick down the door of anyone that's been touched by a botnet data packet. If they did botnets would be a lot less problematic.

You think profiting from botnet operation will be taken lightly by authorities especially if all leads point to some tracable servers? 

Yeah? Cite some precedent for that other than "being sure". If the pool owner receives a request from law enforcement to crackdown I'm sure they will do so, but until then money talks.

You are saying I am comparing apples and oranges but I'm not. Being the recipient of data packets sent by a zombie computer is hardly being part of a botnet operation. It is a gray area. Hence apples to apples. You're the one comparing apples and oranges by suggesting anyone with any contact to a botnet, knowing or unknowing is somehow a criminal.

Please don't compare gray area (new medium/market) with straight up criminal activity. Apples and oranges.

if pool owner removes all logs and keeps profiting from botnets - i'm sure he will be looked at as part of botnet operation and prosecuted as such

Don't be juvenile. Bitcoin itself is a nebulous gray area of legality. By your logic pool operators would not want to be associated with bitcoin at all. A reasonably large pool has a pretty easy claim to deniability in terms of botnet association. They have thousands of clients pummelling their servers with getwork reqs and submitted shares, if they would like to keep a lax watch on their ip tables and gain a very tidy sum of money, why do you think they wouldn't?

Let us imagine some nightmare scenario like the OP suggests. A million zombie computers come online operated by a few botnet owners, they average 100MHash/sec each, running about 100 THash/sec total. The network has grown by roughly 10x in size, normal miners are essentially squeezed out of the network. You are saying that all the pool operators who have been RAKING IN money off bitcoin are suddenly going to say "oh dear, botnets are illegal, I guess we'll all have to shutdown our magical money fountains?"

That's in a worst and most obvious case scenario as well. Say only 4THash came online of botnets, comprising 1/4 the total hashrate of the network, and therefore whatever pool operator welcomed botnets now has easily gobbled up 1/4 of the hashrate, no pool would happily accept that? Not to mention the pools that DONT accept botnets see their own slice of the pie shrink considerably, diminishing their returns by a lot. Enjoy living in fantasy land.


You could of course, but it's a hassle to run a large pool, have it able to have the capacity to handle such a flood of requests, and also sets up a single nodepoint to be shutdown if authorities want to crackdown on you. A pool is easier, just point at it and everything is set up for you. Also makes a nice source for laundering bitcoin.

Most bot miners only run at idle, so people don't notice. They also spread constantly, so by the time one Vic finds out an deletes the infection, it's already infect half his friends with a p2p spread, USB spread, or LAN spread.

I'd think at some point they would get tired of their slow computer and have more techie friend look at it or purchase new system, additonality there will be tools made to detect and prevent such activity. your slaves will have more or less short lifespan if you're going to run their CPU/GPU at 100% constantly.

Most people are too stupid to realize it. I play around with my slaves all the time and they never notice, they think their computer is just slow.

botnets maybe successful at solo for short periods of times,

but if botnets will be abusing people's computers, do you think owners eventually won't notice that something's up with their systems?

If you were running a Botnet you'd very likely want to run your own pool or simply have your bots run solo-mining, as any sane pool operator is going to take actions against you after realizing how many IPs are sending data for you. 

That said, the above objections stand, and in this individuals opinion it is seriously unlikely that botnets will ever account for more than 20% of the total mining going on. 


Just as a personal comment to shads, I don't mean to direct my words towards you specifically, but rather towards what I see as persistent propaganda attempting to scare away new miners.  I certainly encourage anyone concerned about this issue to do their research: I merely attempted to provide my interpretation of the botnet issue as it were.  Certainly, my numbers are just examples based upon my own estimation, and I would never claim any different. 

If you were a smart botnet operator, could you not have all of your controlled machines mining for a bitcoind running on one of the machines?

I don't know how can anyone come to such conclusions. Hacking or seeding malware and taking control  of other people's computers without their consent is straight up illegal and criminal in most countries if not all. You think pool owner knowingly would want to be associated with such activity and profit off of it? [insert facepalm]