Quote from: dga on August 04, 2014, 07:32:17 PM

Quote from: itod on August 04, 2014, 07:26:00 PM

Quote from: dga on August 04, 2014, 07:19:26 PM

Quote from: itod on August 04, 2014, 07:12:22 PM

Quote from: dunchy on August 04, 2014, 06:21:29 PM

Having GPU miner as part of the release bundle at very launch has to be mandatory for coin to be considered as "fairly" launched. CPU2GPU ratio is irrelevant. Even if it is 1:1 it simply has to be released immediately.

I disagree. We are eagerly awaiting for a coin that would *never* have a GPU miner, only CPU. There are people working on this, and Cuckoo Cycle looks the most promising. First coin which achieves this may be a revolution, with millions of individual miners finally being able to get involved in cryptocurrency.

The botnets indeed eagerly await this. I'm pretty sure this is a philosophically wrong goal, but we can debate that another time.

Botnets are unimportant and not an issue. How many +10k botnets are there? Even less +100k botnets, you can probably count them all manually. And only Android has +1Billion 30-day active users:
http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/25/google-now-has-1b-active-android-users/
All botnets combined are just drop in the sea if only a part of those mobile users got involved in mining while devices charge overnight. That's the best chance to bring cryptocurrency to the masses and scale the number of users by few orders of magnitude.

Mobile devices can only mine while plugged in. Their relative mining power is still very small - 1 billion 32 bit 1.6ghz dual core ARM chips are not insignificant, but when operating at less than, say, 25% duty cycle, that's roughly the equivalent of a few tens of millions of powerful servers. Most users won't mine, period -- the ROI is extremely small compared to the time & knowledge needed to set it up, unless the device "just did it" preconfigured. (But that's close to a mobile phone botnet).

How many nodes are involved in botnets worldwide? This list is very out of date, but listed the largest as having 30 *million* nodes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet#Historical_list_of_botnets

More importantly, remember that botnet operators are, in the most fundamental sense of the word, total assholes. They waste someone else's resources to accomplish their own gain. They don't pay power, they don't pay capex, etc. As a result, they asymmetrically benefit from CPU-only coins as a mechanism to monetize stolen computer access.

You are reading it wrong, modern dual/quad core ARM chips would mine with comparable mining power to ordinary botnet node, considering that they will mine while phone is absolutely idle (night) they may even be on par with desktop computers which have to do something else while they mine. The larger the botnet, the shorter it last because they are easier to detect, so even if there are some of them which have multi-million nodes, what's that compared to thousands of millions of active mobile users?

I don't understand why do you think people would not mine if the mobile miner has an easy, mobile app style installation? Once they realize the potential, they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. People are not (that) stupid. We just need the right algorithm to be absolutely GPU resistant, and Cuckoo Cycle is on the brink of being that. Once it happens, there will be no going back. The altcoin which achieves that will be a real silver to Bitcoin's gold.