> And in any event, bitcoin is never going to work as a global payments system. Not only does it suffer from having a slow-growing money supply and a metastasizing transactions file which has to live on every user’s computer, it also encourages destructive computer hacking. The way that the money supply grows, in the bitcoin system, is by people harnessing the power of hundreds or thousands of computers to solve very complicated mathematical tasks, earning bitcoins for doing so along the way. And the easiest and cheapest way of doing that is to do so illegally, by stealth: set up a “botnet” of hacked computers to do your bidding for you. The incentives, here, are very bad indeed.

I'm not an expert, but I thought that these days you basically need specialized hardware/GPUs and a traditional botnet isn't going to get you that far. Am I right?