Few things attract fraudsters more than bubbles. When the market is rising then their crimes get hidden – especially as those speculating in the market are unlikely to want to have its legitimacy called into question.
So too with Bitcoin – the BBC reports that the ever inflating bubble in Bitcoin has attracted the criminals who run botnets. Although these things are generally not too computationally powerful they are big enough and the market inflated enough to make it worth the while of criminals to target “Bitcoin mining“: the computationally intensive task of generating a new Bitcoin (the equivalent of digging another sovereign’s worth of gold out of the ground).
A sure sign of the crazy nature of the Bitcoin market is that it has caused inflation in the price of setting up a Botnet. Spamming – the more usual use of a Botnet – relies on the low (close to zero) marginal cost of sending out a spam email – something that is itself a function of the cost of establishing and running a Botnet.
One delicious thing to look forward to when the Bitcoin bubble bursts is that the Botnet owners will be economically ruined along with all the other speculators.
Related articles
- When will the Bitcoin burst happen? (cartesianproduct.wordpress.com)
- Cyber Currency Bitcoin Soars In Value (julianmoskov.wordpress.com)
- Bitcoin Bubble 2.0: “From A Monetary Standpoint – They Are On Par With The Stuff You Find At Chuck E. Cheese’s” (financialsurvivalnetwork.com)
- How To “Mine” Bitcoins And Make Real Money (businessinsider.com)
- Re: When is it not a bubble? (bitcointalk.org)
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 