Alaric Snell-Pym [17/05/11 12:09 +0100]:
In practice, the "miners" (people who set out to win blocks) don't use CPUs; they use GPUs (as found on video cards). Certain brands of GPU (ATI ones, it seems) are good at the maths required for SHA-256, so they put loads of graphics cards into their PCs and set them trying out random numbers until they get a 'win'.
That's fine. Now throw a few thousand or more (botnets can range in size from a few k to a few million) at this? GPUs, fine, rather than CPUs. Its not the scammer's PC resources. And the scammer won't do this unless bitcoin is seriously worth his time and resources to do it. But he can do it, make no mistake
