Quote from: travel-trousers on February 11, 2014, 05:53:13 PM

Quote from: billotronic on February 11, 2014, 05:06:45 PM

Starting to read the anti botnet white paper and my first question is are botnet slaves really that much slower?

Could the same could be said for low end VPS's?

I've been trying to find some figures about average specs but I'm still looking. The majority of machines are probably just used for surfing the net, imagine the old PC some grandma has that she never installed anti virus on... old, useless, but it still ok for email and basic surfing, and since they don't do any banking or need a secure PC they don't care so much about security.

The problem is that there are literally MILLIONS of these machines all over the world. They hash very, very slowly individually, but add them together and you have a massive mining network... for free.

VPS's are not the issue, if you want to use one you'll have to pay for it... free beats that every time.

Thank you for your response.

I think you have a good idea on trying to cutout the botnets, I really do, BUT I think that will be a nasty double edged sword due to you may end up cutting out a large portion of your potential user base. A good example of this would be between folks who have either A: slow internet (still a wide spread issue) or B: folks who do not have SSDs, 32G of ram etc etc who's computers might not meet your specs.

Again, great idea and really, probably the only way to deal with said issue... I just don't see how you can find a happy medium. Though I would love to be proved wrong.

And yeah, right on about hash consolidation... its not just a BTC issue.