Trojan.Badminer: A trojan that mines bitcoins | Hacker News Reader

Trojan.Badminer: A trojan that mines bitcoins

symantec.com

21 pointscodedivine9 comments

Such a waste. I am not sure if the author considered that there is a maximum output of BitCoins per hour. So even if you have the greates botnet in the world, you can at most make a couple of thousands bucks every day. OK, better than nothing, but still, very wasteful.

that doesn't seem like such a waste to whoever controls the destination address..

((24 hours) / (10 minutes)) * 50 * (10 usd) = 72000 usd

your share is proportional to your share of the total network hashing power.

Can you explain your math a bit more? I find it difficult to believe that even a botnet can generate 72k USD equivalent per day.

He is right, though - assuming a BitCoin exchange rate of 10$. You can generate at most 50BTC every 10 minutes, or 300BTC per hour. So it is 300x24+10 = 72000.

Nope, the entire BTC network makes $72k every day. The larger your botnet, the bigger your share.

each block includes a "blank check" transaction crediting 50 bitcoins to an arbitrary address. every 2016 blocks, the clients look at the rate of block generation and adjusts their difficulty expectation to target 1 block per 10 minutes. your chance of solving a block (and crediting yourself 50 bitcoins) is proportional to your hashing rate.

by the way, a miner only has to control above 50% of the hashing power to monopolize bitcoin generation - they can then ignore other block solutions without their branch being orphaned.

I guess the advantage is that bitcoins are untraceable?

Impressive to note that it can utilise the host's GPU if present. Nice touch, in an evil way.

Love the name. Anyone else think of this, especially since this program tries to "undermine" the Bitcoin network through distributed mining:

"BEHOOOOOOOOOLD, the UNDERMINER! I am beneath all of you, but NOTHING is BENEATH ME! I hereby declare WAAAAAAAR on PEACE and HAPPINESS!"

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