Botnets are only a significant concern
while the mining usage is small.
And that applies whether your Pow is designed to be ASIC resistant or not. However it perhaps does beg for making the GPU at roughly power efficiency parity to the CPU.
As you mention in your subsequent post, algorithms that make use of recent CPU and OS features are likely to hinder botnets to a significant degree. This is already the case with Cryptonight. Older botnet computers are less likely to have AES-NI, more likely to be 32 bit, and more likely to have older, slower CPUs with fewer cores and/or less cache.
Together these reduce the effectiveness of a botnet computer relative to an efficient CPU or GPU miner by perhaps a factor of 10. Exotic botnets (routers, etc.) will fair much worse.
A footnote[3] from my L3crypt whitepaper provides data that might say you are incorrect on your appraisal of the average computer out there for botnets.
[3]
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/http://www.forbes.com/sites/eliseackerman/2012/05/19/i-run-a-small-botnet-and-sell-stolen-information-ask-me-anything/Asian installs are very cheap, $15 per 1000 installs and have good GPUs,
http://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/comments/1e03tn/iama_steam_market_bot_writer_who_recently_got/I kept my bots running as fast as possible by locating it as close to Valve HQ to minimise ping
Valve is steampowered.
So rich boy asians who spend a lot on gaming machines might be significant source of botnets capable of attacking Monero in its current form, because AES-NI has been around several generations of CPUs (Intel and AMD) since 2010ish. Whereas, AVX2 is new in Haswell and also operating system support is new.
The doubling (Claymore said "1.5 - 2.0") of performance for 64-bit on Monero isn't enough by itself to mitigate botnets running at 32-bit.
Currently the Monero network consists of the hash rate equivalent of very roughly 100K modern desktop computers (64-bit, AES-NI, 8 MB cache) or mid range mining rig GPUs (750 Ti, etc.). For a botnet to 51% attack that would require roughly 1M of these more-likely-to-be-botted computers. That is certainly possible, but it is a obstacle. How many botnets are 1M+?
Agreed the 50+% attack becomes more improbable as mining usage increases. But don't forget Meni Rosenfeld's white paper, you don't actually need 50% to achieve an n confirmation attack with some smaller probability.
But more importantly, also the 50% doesn't apply to botnets that could get your coin at much lower than market prices, which concentrates ownership (or they sell driving prices down and also concentrates ownership into whales like rpietila who would be sitting on the bid if they want to acquire more). Which is especially a concern with a coin such as Monero which rapidly declines the rate of debasement so that early on most of the coins are mined (when the most vulnerability to botnets getting coins cheaply exists). As your mining network increases after years, then the botnets can't be such a significant percentage.
Sorry but I find some many flaws in Monero and I know you don't like me, but I speak frankly on the technical facts (no it isn't "philosophical", it is technology). It isn't personal, even
you childish guys try to make it personal.
Smaller botnets that decide to honestly mine instead of attack increase the hash rate and help secure the network against attacks.
Agreed. But they also get coins cheaply, which is a problem as I explained above.