The issue he's pointing out is that the rational, amoral actor will have to decide between a saturated market of ASICs with extremely long time to ROI, and a quick buck off of grandma's draining laptop battery.
Note: if you run Pydio, update to the newest version. Everything below 5.04 has a serious security vulnerability. That's how they got into our machine.
> it's much more profitable to mine Litecoin.
Only because its younger than bitcoin. Making bitcoins was trivial a couple years ago. Considering both have a maximum number of coins, this dicussion is academic. Once that max is hit then its just traded as any ugly market commodity.
The unfortunate side-effect of this is that LtC botnets are far more viable relative to the total network hashrate than BtC botnets, as the difference in power between commodity computers and ASICs as far as hashing is concerned is far less for LtC than BtC.
Shows how little this site knows about how normal users perceive currency.
Keep your butts, keep your LTC, and your peer cons. You guys missed the moonboat and now real users are going to dictate the future of currency.
Doge coin has arrived to crash the alt coin market and rise above to save the people from all the greed and scum that has overtaken the bitcoin inindustry. Yes I'm looking at you hacker news. Why do you all just care about money so much?
And I don't mean hacked boxens but people (mostly PhD students) working there, running some unused machine for mining under their desk.
If they give you free electricity, is it really "stealing"?
http://www.bitcoindifficulty.com/
You'd need a LOT of regular PCs to match even one simple asic. A butterfly lab's jalapeno does ~5 gigahash/sec. You'd have to infest 500 decent PCs to achieve that, and then wait about a month for about a tenth of a bitcoin.
So to get 1 btc in a month, you'd need to infect 5k PCs without them noticing that "damn, my machine is really pegged" and "golly, this laptop is awfully hot and my battery dies really fast...".
It has happened, but realistically you could just buy a miner and be done with it. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/07/botcoin-bitcoin-mining-b...
They were able to get ~240 machines, at a time when CPU mining was making them ~$350/day. Decent, but worth all the time to write the software and distribute it? Eh, probably not.
The rational, amoral actor with access to a botnet of general-purpose machines will have to decide between using them to mine for BTC and using them for another profitable, illegal purpose, such as relaying spam, performing DDOS attacks etc.
As the difficulty of mining increases, the profitability of mining on a botnet decreases relative to the other potential uses for the botnet.
Currently, I would be surprised if mining for BTC on home computers would yield enough coin to pay even for the cost of building the botnet in the first place.
(Computers with high-end AMD cards can do better - up to 1.2 gigahashes/sec on AMD's top-of-the-range card but they're also a lot rarer so shouldn't drive up the average much.)