Bitcoin mining efficiency and Botnets

[coderman]

On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 5:45 PM, Bill Stewart <bill.stewart at pobox.com> wrote:
> ...
>         "The botnet's Bitcoin operation was only profitable because it used
> stolen electricity:
>         it used about $561,000 of electricity a day on its victims'
> machines, while only generating $2,165 a day."
> What does this say about the future of Bitcoin mining?

that it is getting harder ;)



> I'm guessing that the botnet only mined on CPUs, not on GPUs,
> because doing GPU calculations requires adapting code to different kinds of
> hardware
> and is likely to have visible effects on the screen if you're not careful,

it used both, and yes, you need to tune the kernels and work load
conservatively to not cause performance degradation visible to the
user. this is entirely doable and i've seen it done.



> but even so, does this mean that Bitcoin miners who want to make a profit
> are going to need to dump general-purpose machines in favor of specialized
> hardware
> such as FPGAs or ASICs?  Or is buying a high-end GPU still good enough?

GPU miners are the new CPU miners.  it's an all ASIC game now...



best regards,