Making the mining algo less friendly to bonnets and more friendly to everyday pc users might help if it could be integrated with real life uses for small amounts.
I think this is highly confused. An everyday PC user is almost exactly identical to a botnet. In fact I've described a successful decentralized cryptocurrency (i.e. not one dominated by purpose-built GPU rigs and/or ASICs) as being a botnet that enlists the user's help to install it. For this reason Monero is the coin (among the top few dozen by market cap at least) that is most friendly to mining by everyday users.
The main reason botnets get so much attention is that so
few actual users are using the coin (including mining), thus the proportion attributed to botnets becomes larger. Throw a few million (or more) actual users in the mix and botnets are tiny by comparison.
Anyway, I largely agree with the rest of your points and Come-In-Behind's similar comments.
I could dig deeper into this but my impression is that the cryptonote algo isn't as efficient at punishing lower end older CPUs as it could be. The tendency of botnets is to capture grandma's computer (Walmart computer from 3 years ago) Not the gamers/hipsters/business professionals high end gaming pc/mac/ultrabook computer.
This might be a misperception on my part. The newer the PC, the less likely to be infected by a botnet as the owner probably cares more about controlling his own hardware.
+9999 on the guy who mentioned security. A wallet that limited withdrawals to a small amount per 24 hour period unless multisig from a second device was used. And then sent a warning message to the second wallet (maybe phone thin wallet?) Would be amaxing.
I believe Ethereum is working on a method to force miners to keep the block chain on the local machine (would help in making botnets less of a factor)
I have a windows machine. I refuse to use Linux even though I work in IT. I live in fear of keeping too much on an exchange and more fear of keeping it on my local machine.