On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 01:00:20AM -0800, Jonathan Thornburg wrote: > On Thu, 23 Feb 2012, James A. Donald wrote: > [[for attacking bitcoin]] > > botnets cannot compete with legit miners, because to get a reasonable > > return, > > you need to mine with a graphics card, and while mining with graphics card, > > your graphics goes to hell, which will cause the most slow witted owner of a > > zombie computer to do something. > > It's pretty easy for the botnet to monitor for human activity (e.g., > mouse movement, non-screensaver processes running) and suspend their > activity then. Since the computer is likely idle most of the time > (I'm assuming bonets mainly use home computers, which will be idle > when their owners are sleeping, and usually when owners are out > at school/work/shopping/etc in the daytime), the botnet throughput > is only modestly degraded.
What is the actual problem with botnet blocks (which, so far I'm aware of, is a purely theoretical situation at this point)? Pecuniam non olet, after all. In general so far I fail to see the validity of most criticisms against BitCoin. So far I see the only real problem is government crackdown on exchanges, which only makes BTC free-floating and slows down the growth of the underlying economy. Sorry if this is off-topic to cryptography. We can take the thread offlist at any time. _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list [email protected] http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
