has anyone ever considered that bitcoin pretty much is a botnet itself?
I mean, really, people, you are all doing distributed work which is controlled by a piece of software over the network.
To translate from the german wikipedia entry for botnet:
A botnet is a group of software bots. these bots run on networked computers, whose network connectivity and local resources are at their disposal.
One other from the english wiki page:
Botnets are controlled en masse via protocols such as IRC and http.
Anyone hearing a bell ringing? The only difference is that most Bitcoiners run the software willingly.