Quote from: 556j on September 16, 2012, 08:58:24 PM

Quote from: yokosan on September 16, 2012, 03:18:09 PM

This whole state of affairs undermines bitcoin and is enough to destroy faith in the currency. Mining needs an overhaul, I don't pretend to know the solution.

Yup sky is falling. Or you are clueless. ASIC will fix the botnet problem. Botnet are useful for other things, once bitcoins becomes less profitable they will move to other things. You say there is no cost but it's not true since botnets can be sold thus opportunity cost. When the cpu/gpu nets go from producing 100+ coins a month to 1 coin a month you can bet they will do other things with the zombies.

No, you don't understand. You can still make huge amounts of coin at current difficult with botnets that exclusively use CPU miners. That's right CPU only miners. I am not saying it is ideal, and obviously the big players are doing GPU mining, but I am trying to make the point that ASIC is not going to be remotely close to "fixing the botnet problem".

Also we are not talking about 100+ coins a month. We are talking about people making 10,000+ coins a month each. It is a huge % of the total coins generated per month, I would not be surprised if botnets reached 50% of total hashpower in the future. It is only on the rise as more people with the knowhow find out how much can be made.