I will pose - re-post - this question here, where it might get more feedback:
Why would anyone mine XMR for profit now when you can mine QuazarCoin, cash it in, and buy 30% more XMR than you can get from mining? For that matter, Vertcoin should get you about 100% better return (GPU basis). The only rational reason to mine XMR now is because you want to help build the network - or you are just too lazy to switch coins.
Can anyone make a rational argument against this claim: The current hash power is almost 100% enthusiasts, who mine because of confidence, support for XMR. (They are not likely to be sellers.) It makes no sense at all for any botnet to mine XMR for sale.
(Yet the current hash rate is roughly 85% of the historical high. The depth of support this demonstrates is breathtaking.)
Because of the cost of trying to constantly track down and switch around to the most profitable coin.
Because of the quantity and relative stability of the pools.
Because of the volume available for exchange relative to the size of the market.
It makes absolute sense for a botnet to mine XMR for sale, because it has the largest volume of any of the cryptonotes and is the most *consistently* profitable coin over a longer period of time. The activity of the botnet is least likely to perturb the profitability (i.e., to increase the difficulty).
Having 5000 nodes mining is a somewhat nontrivial management problem when you consider downtime due to pool failures, the latency of updating them, the increased risk of being discovered due to increased C&C traffic, etc.
QCN has 196kh/s
XMR has 13MH/s
A 5000 node botnet running at 500kh/s is less than 4% of XMR, and thus, is unlikely to reduce the botnetter's profitability.
A 5000 node botnet running at 500kh/s would cause the difficulty of QCN to triple, and thus, render it much less profitable.
Math is a wonderful thing.
