A botnet CAN be against the will of the owners.
That's just plain wrong. Please inform yourself before posting nonsense.
BTC itself is a Peer-to-Peer network. A Botnet is a network of infected computers, controlled by one or a few persons remotely.
has anyone ever considered that bitcoin pretty much is a botnet itself?
No, because this is stupid, see above.
I mean, really, people, you are all doing distributed work which is controlled by a piece of software over the network.
Peer to Peer != Botnet!I can only repeat: Inform yourself before posting.
Anyone hearing a bell ringing? The only difference is that most Bitcoiners run the software willingly.
And that's a
huge differance. A differance between 10 years of jail vs a well-used open source project, for starters.
It's hilarious how you're even quoting wikipedia twice, but fail to read (or understand) the very first sentence:
A botnet is a collection of compromised computers, termed bots, that are used for malicious purposes. A computer becomes a bot when it runs a file, typically from a drive-by download, that has bot software embedded in it. Botnets are controlled en masse via protocols such as IRC and http.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet