Before I type my little idea scenario here, I am not advocating the use of these ideas.
For some reason I cannot stop thinking about what to do with all this leftover mining equipment when difficulty and electric cost make my S3 miners unprofitable. My imagination runs wild with ideas. I read on bitcointalk ideas for using miners as space heaters while obvious generating small amounts of bitcoin. What a great idea! Of course taking into account cost, electric efficiency, and heat output of a space heater and comparing it to a bitcoin miner. This again has me thinking.
We hear about “botnets” or these big malware viruses that can be downloaded on a victim’s computer and then start mining bitcoin for a perpetrator. One computer might not add up to a lot of bitcoin, but spread it out over 100,000 downloaders and I’m sure it starts becoming profitable. However, the same rule applies to these malware creators as it does miners. Difficulty will always raise making the operation less profitable as time goes on. Instead of stealing computer resources to mine bitcoin, crypto-crooks will have to move on to something else. Electricity.
Here’s a scenario I see happening in the future. S3 miners become no longer efficient because of electricity rates and difficulty. They drop in price and are very affordable. Crypto-crook “Steve” attaches a wifi antenna to his S3 board heads to the nearest Starbucks, or even a nice highway rest area. Steve slides a piece of the drop ceiling out of place in the bathroom, and taps into the electricity from the florescent light. He plugs in his S3 miner, and connects it to the free wifi. There you have it, Steve is now running a rig that is virtually untraceable if found, and will run until it
IS found. Or until it burns down the building lol. Which is another thing we might see.
We see reports of people using workplace servers to mine bitcoin, and there is always chatter in the forums about moving into a college dorm with electric included and running a few miners. Imagine a tech guy at a small but busy doctor’s office throwing an S3 miner on the server rack. No one would question it unless a new tech guy got hired.
Do you guys think electricity theft or even just ‘scheming’ with included electricity is going to turn into a big thing once we hit our climax of ASIC hardware? I think we are going to see some clever and useful, but also dangerous and illegal activates start taking place.
