Topic: Mining will become controlled by botnets (Read 4166 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]

Well first off, a pool has no vested interest in botnets. More hashing power to them means more money to them. Tycho has more or less been a standup guy in the bitcoin community, which is cool, but if botnets become more profitable I wouldn't be surprised or vexxed if he suddenly "stopped finding" botnets.

Secondly a botnet isn't exactly hard to detect. When one account suddenly has 5000-500000 IP addresses popping data in for it,  you'd have to be blind to not 'detect' it.

deepbit can already detect botnets

http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=23243.0

This has all been discussed before.

There are not enough botnets to make a difference.  Someone making a massive botnet will get better profits from renting it out or using it for spamming.

This seriously is not a problem.

I have no interest in building a botnet.  I have more productive ways to use my time.  I just noticed you are in fact a pool operator.  I might remind you as I'm soon to be in the same boat myself that pool operators have no vested interest in the total number of miners, pool income is purely a function of market share with a small adjustment for the current rate of growth.  So I have no motive for scaring off miners or encouraging them.  I am simply interested in exploring possible future scenarios.  If you wish to be a tool and accuse me of spreading panic and paranoia so be it but at least try to understand the issue.

If you have the expertise, go ahead and put together your own botnet and we'll see how well you do.

That's a pretty sweeping assumption... Are you saying all gamers are tech savvy?  I know plenty of die hard gamers that still think RAID-0 keeps their data safer because it's got RAID in the name.


bollocks... I can download, configure and start a GPU miner from the command line.  From the command line I can check for signatures in the registry to detect the graphics card driver, I can download and install the appropriate OpenCL SDK.  None of this is hard for someone capable of writing the code for a botnet.  


Detecting downtime for the machine is also not hard.  Any botnet operator worthy of the name would understand the risk of running the slave pc flat out 24/7.  Simply setting a low aggression with some kernels allows gaming without any noticeable impact yet when the PC is unused you get 95% of the hash rate you'd get if you had high aggression settings.  Your talking 10000 but the biggest known botnet today is 4 million.  Even it was only 25% utilization and they could get the GPUs working on only a fraction we're still talking massive processing power.


You can call it a delusion but you've made some very assertive calculations based on completely false assumptions.  

This pervasive myth needs to be shut down.  Mining will never be controlled by botnets for the following reasons:

A: Botnets can only easily gain control of computers run by those who are not technically savvy.  Non-tech-savvy people very RARELY run powerful GFX cards.  The Botnet owner would need thousands of computers in the Botnet to hope to achieve the power of a couple dozen powerful computers, or even a dozen duel-GPU systems.

B: Accessing the GFX card is one of the most difficult operations to do remotely, meaning this would only be achieved by a small minority of genius programmers capable of writing and constantly rewriting code to keep up with the nuances of security that gets in the way of accessing the GPU.  In almost all cases, even these Botnet owners would be lucky to access even half of the GPUs in their Botnet.

C: Mining requires very high levels of GFX performance.  The Botnet operator would need to either choose between having the GPUs in the Botnet run at full speed (causing both system slowness and crashes that would encourage the non-tech-savvy person to either buy a new computer or reformat the OS, likely increasing security as they do so, removing their computer from the Botnet).  OR, the Botnet operator would have to run the GFX cards at a slow enough pace not to interfere with performance on these lower-end machines, which means conservatively 25% utilization at maximum to avoid the owners resetting their systems to factory spec and wiping away the Botnet software.

Between these points, it quickly becomes clear that a Botnet consisting of 10,000 computers will not be nearly as effective as originally considered.  Point A takes the 10,000 and makes them as powerful as about 500 high-end dual-GPU systems, Point B drops this number to around 200, and point C drops the utilization to around 50.  Assuming 500 Mhash/s per system, that is a grand total of 25Ghash/s for the ABSOLUTE BEST and well run Botnet.  In all likelihood for the average Botnet owner (a few hundred systems) it simply wouldn't be worth the time or effort.  

Even if 100 'Absolute Best' Botnets came into existence (or a few less with more computers under their control), a change of 2500Ghash is only 20% of the existing network today.  Sure, these Botnet owners would make a profit, but if they all joined the network today (and none of them were previously in the network) we'd only see difficulty increase by 15-20%.  And its fairly safe to say that there are substantially less than 100 Botnets capable of running 10,000 computers with the absolute best software.

This delusion, however pervasive, should be outright ignored.  Mining will continue being hosted primarily by the network of GPU owners for the foreseeable future, so stop creating panic and paranoia.

No. You seem to have no idea how much that jump may be.

here something I was told:

ONE usb box starting availability soonish will take 50 watt and deliver around 8 gigahash.

3 6990 take about 1100 watt and deliver 2.4 gigahash.

Imagine

This will turn into a business side where you either invest into special gear, or get out.

If the difficulty where to jump that high, wouldn't most people stop mining?  Therefore dropping the difficulty back down?

Mining won't be controlled by botnets as GPUs will eventually be replaced by custom hardware (ASIC/FPGA). Difficulty will rise so high that having 20GH/s will be like having 20MH/s right now. Botnets will control a portion of mining for a short period of time, in relation to the BTC mining timeline. It's naive to think that GPUs will be the preferred method of mining 1-2 years from now.

This is old news. Many of my colleagues on HF are getting over 17 GH/s

You mean that botnets might rent out their processing capacity?  If so then I guess it's possible but it doesn't change the point, they will control large portions of the total mining pool at price point that makes it unprofitable for miners that have to pay their own energy costs.

I didnt mean to imply coding would be difficult.
But ive thinking about it a littlebit more and maybot net operators will hook up $800 gpus for faster resources and you purchase share of the gpu power. Personally i dont see the poit youd end up having to pay relativly the same amount becuase of how much the card costs. Id personally would rath spend $100 a month on saving up on gpus then spending it on a "share" of gpu resources. Own a video card can payit self off after a short amount of time and if mining gets unprofitable you could always sell the card and get some of your investment back

No I mean GPUs.  If you've can run arbitrary code on slave PC its pretty trivial to detect the presence of a suitable GPU and send it the appropriate code to run.  Even to install any necessary drivers.  Why would the botnet operator be spending money? 

I thinkyou mean cpus not gpus i highly doubt operators will spend over $800 or more for shared hashing just to make a couple of buck  although pluasable.

It's inevitable.  The widely held assumption is that the mining rate will stabilize around about the point where profits = energy costs + a nominal amount for new hardware investment.  But that assumes a level playing field.  Botnet operators will eventually build functionality into their user agents to tap into GPU's if they're available, when they do they'll have the power of a botnet behind them without power costs.  Botnets just became that much more profitable.

What are the implications of the block chain being under the effective control of botnet operators?  Well at least we can be confident they're unlikely to work together, competition in the black markets is probably more fierce than in legal markets.