Bitcoin In 2017: Fixin Ta Blow Up

[John Newman]

> On Dec 29, 2016, at 4:45 AM, Georgi Guninski <guninski at guninski.com> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Dec 29, 2016 at 04:32:58AM -0500, John Newman wrote:
>>> Are there stats about bitcoin fraud vs traditional financial fraud?
>>> Decentralization complicates things.
>>> Especially about fraud done by malware.
>> 
>> I don't have stats but i know that fucking worm PhotoMiner (a monero miner propagated through FTP amongst other methods) is endemic... There are a lot of dumb shits mining monero without knowing it.
>> 
>> I still see it banging on the door of FTP server trying to upload itself (and failing and getting blocked) from at least a few hosts every day. 
> 
> Mining bitcoins without knowing it is essentially non-issue  compared to
> stealing the bitcoin wallet or abusing some subtle ``feature" of Bitcoin.
> 

Sure, wallet theft is more akin to a heist and could net massive gains if you pick your target well. Is there any malware that actively looks for and steals wallets? I don't know, probably.

Still, with a big enough bot net doing your mining and paying for the wattage i imagine it adds up. I wouldn't mind owning one :)

It seems bitcoin is pretty resilient to other attacks on subtle features... although i'm not  that well versed in the subject.