My shitty US dollars are federaly insured...

Yet again this was an attack on the exchange, not on the bit torrent code. It would be the same as I am going to stop using Visa because Target got hacked.

Tell me again how, when Target got hacked, all of the money that you had in your savings account at the bank completely vanished without a trace, leaving you SOL.

I don't know much about bitcoin but why use a bank? Why not store it on an external hard drive that you take offline and store in a safe when you're not using it?

I think you'd use the bank for transfers and such. Or if you wanted to be able to access your coin from all over the world.

So my analogy was a bit off. I was more trying to make the point that it was a third party flaw, not a flow in the actual bitcoin protocol. Say for example you decide to put all your money into paypal and not a normal bank. Paypal is not a "bank" and does not get standard protections in the US. If someone found a flaw in paypals code and was able to funnel out all the money from paypal to some place else and Paypal went bankrupt you would also be SOL.

People keep coins in exchanges when they want to be able to convert the coins to some sort of physical currency. You are a fool if you keep all your coins up on an exchange and not in a private wallet on media you physically control. When using coins as a currency there is no reason to have to use an exchange, You can simply send the coins to the receivers wallet address.

All my personal bitcoins are stored in a private wallet, I simply send them out to whoever I am purchasing things from. I have yet to have a single coin stolen, or lost any coins to hacking. If you are smart about it, and actually cautious with your coins you will be fine.

that's a better way to state it.

Rick (old owner of mt.net) actually is heavily into bitcoin and altcoin mining. Last time I talked to him he was pulling in $450-550 a day with mining. He was actually looking to rent a dedicated warehouse space with additional power so he could go form 10-15 mining machines to something like 50+ mining machines.

I'm going to start mining Doge Coins
http://d.ibtimes.co.uk/en/full/13591...=200&l=50&t=40

If you got a $500 Radeon video card then you are all set to try mine Doge Coins, otherwise you are only loosing money on it.

Nah. Just need to find the keys to the local universities server closet. Sneak a couple ASCI Miners behind a rack and walk away :).

Lol. Current bitcoin mining difficulty 4,250,217,919.87.

Has anyone heard of compromised computers being leveraged for mining?

So calculated, running 6 ASCI miners achieving 1980 mh/s, you will earn 0.00023428 bc per day.

I am actually running an ASCI miner on my server at home. It has paid for itself and it generates about enough each month to pay for my vpn access.

When I last checked there were no ASCI miners out that would mine the alt coins. Most alt coin currencies are designed to made using dedicated ASCI miners harder. So people were building desktop pc's with 4 ATI cards in them to mine with. The break even point was to long and the initial capital expense was to high for me to want to get into alt coin mining.

You mean like using a zombie army to mine rather than DDOS? I dont see why that wouldnt be happening.

Yah, this exactly.

Because desktop pc's and servers are so inefficient at mining now that it is a complete waste. Basically at this point if you do not already have a large ASCI farm you will not make money mining bit coins. I personally got lucky that I bought my ASCI miner before they got extremely popular, so I was able to make back my initial investment. I expect by the end of 2014 it won't even be earning enough to pay for my VPN service monthly, unless the value of BTC goes up a ton.

When I last talked to Rick he had about $25,000 tied into 10 alt coin mining machines. It would take about 2 months to make back your initial investment at current BTC values, and alt coin mining difficulty level.

It's already been done several times.

Here's a report about a botnet mining operation that spread through a piece of malware on the Skype network: Bitcoin-mining malware spreading through Skype | ITProPortal.com

Here's one where the gaming company E-Sports Entertainment deliberately infected their own customer's computers and turned them into a mining net: http://www.geekosystem.com/easa-bitcoin-mining/

Here's one from January, where a piece of malware spread through Yahoo ads by way of a weakness in Java: Yahoo malware transforms thousands of computers in Bitcoin miners | BGR

and did he tell you how much money he put into the operation?

edit:


yes you did. he told me it was a bit more than that.