Quote from: Agestorzrxx on March 10, 2015, 09:47:58 AM

Use CPU to mining bitcoin?
What a stupid idea.
they can't mine a bitcoin with more than 10 years.

The program actually mines litecoins but otherwise, yeah. They wouldn't make much money at all.

Quote from: Kevinrasf on March 10, 2015, 09:52:05 AM

Still you should read the installers, free software always tries this BS to install crap on your PC.

Freeware often does. Free and open source software (FOSS) usually (but not always) doesn't.

Quote from: Monetizer on March 10, 2015, 10:03:16 AM

But could you imagine with say 1 million cpu's all running at once? They might be able to make a fair bit from that, also I don't think this was utorrent itself.

I posted a calculation on another thread here about how much money 1 million PCs would be able to make by mining bitcoins. The result was that 1 million PCs mining 24/7 at max performance would earn roughly $150 per day. Using the same hardware to mine altcoins would earn much more:

Quote from: Bizmark13 on March 09, 2015, 11:38:29 PM

Quote from: philipma1957 on January 08, 2015, 11:18:44 PM

Assuming it could be written and not detected. It would pull either part of the cpu or part of the discrete gpu.

neither part does a lot of hashing. Say you bleed 10 percent of the cpu or gpu. maybe 50mh a pc so 20 pc's for 1 gh.

2000 pc's for 1th

2,000,000 pc's for 1ph.

not much more can be bleed off without detection.

So is it possible to make a virus that infects 2mill pc's sure. and if you are never caught you hash at 1ph. my guess is it would be found out quickly. since all the pc's would be dedicating a decent amount of cpu/gpu/watts to the mining.

If 20 PCs equal 1 GH/s then wouldn't you need 20,000 PCs for 1 TH/s and 20,000,000 PCs for 1 PH/s?

Anyway, both Bitcoin mining viruses and non-SHA-256 altcoin mining viruses would be profitable (it is free electricity, after all). A 1 million PC botnet where each PC is capable of 50 MH/s would have a total hashpower of about 50 million MH/s or 50 TH/s. At the current difficulty, the botnet operator would get a reasonable-ish passive profit of $150* per day according to Coinwarz.

However, the botnet operator could earn much more than this if he chose to mine CPU and GPU mineable altcoins instead. If he mined Darkcoin and we assume that each PC has 3 MH/s of X11 hashing power, he would get $75,000** per day!

Viruses that mine scrypt-based currencies would fall somewhere in the middle as they have ASICs built for them but the performance difference between ASIC mining and GPU mining is not as extreme as SHA-256.

*If the miner only mined at 10% max performance to prevent the PC owners from finding out, it would only bring in $15 a day.

**Again, if the miner only mined at 10% max performance, it would bring in $7,500 a day. I'm not sure if this is practically feasible though since dumping that many coins on an exchange every single day would depress the price and surely the exchange owners will find out?