Quote from: luigi1111 on August 12, 2015, 03:35:58 PM

Quote from: primer- on August 12, 2015, 01:53:37 PM

True. 80% of monero mining power comes from botnets. These people (mostly chinese) don't care about 5% - 15% price difference. I dont think this will change anytime soon Sad

It would be helpful if you could provide conclusive proof of this number, or even any proof at all.

I know of one independent observer who was hired to write hit piece about Monero being mined by botnets last year. His conclusion:

Quote from: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3g1rpx/mad_bitcoins_on_twitter_the_truth_behind/ctu82sf

They asked me to investigate into accusations that Monero was mined exclusively (or almost exclusively) with malware powered botnets.
Instead, I found evidence that it was mostly mined with cloud computing. You can tell because the difficulty (at least around summer 2014) would mirror the prices at Amazon. When it went up, the difficulty went down and when it went down the difficulty went up.
When I tried to write that story, they killed it, so it never got published

In other words, the constant loud chorus we heard last year of "Botnets! Botnets! Botnets!" was a complete and utter load of horseshit, which is exactly what I said at the time based on my analysis of mining costs and difficulty. I still think think it is horseshit today. Although the difficulty and costs don't support cloud mining any more, they do support mining with reasonably-efficient hardware at reasonably-low electricity prices, even with a bit of a profit. If mining were dominated by botnets, that would not be the case.

There are probably botnets, of course, but nowhere near 80%. If much of the mining is Chinese, which is may be (I don't know) that is probably GPU farms that got repurposed from Scrypt. Or maybe something else, but not botnets.