Mint It Yourself With a Browser-Based Bitcoin Miner

An anonymous reader writes "There's a popular discussion happening at the Bitcoin forums about a new browser-based bitcoin miner released today. This lets people mine for bitcoin straight from the browser. There's talk of making an embeddable version. How long until websites start using CPU power from their users to create Bitcoin for their owners?" As Bitcoin gets more attention, I foresee malware with payloads promising to do the same thing.

Comments

"mining" for bitcoin

[smash]

So, essentially, we're burning CPU cycles (and thus, electricity, and thus, fossil fuels in most cases) simply to give an electronic currency scarcity?

Sounds like a fine use of resources to me!

/sarcasm

Re:Bitcoin -

[Anonymous Coward]

Bitcoin network charts:

In the last 12 days "There are 201 unconfirmed transactions".

That's not an "economy" by any means. Your average American highschool probably has more kids purchasing drugs, smokes, and booze from one another in a 12 day time period than that.

Re:Getting you at the exit nodes

[Jeremi]

That's where they'll get you. Or Visa/Mastercard will stop processing for wherever bitcoin.org is hosted after a friendly call from a Senator.

Bitcoin.org could be lawyered right off the face of the Earth and it wouldn't make any difference. You'd still be able to trade BTC for USD (or vice versa) with any of the thousands of other Bitcoin owners. It's all P2P, remember?

I find Bitcoin interesting

[QuantumG]

Both as a technical concept and as a social phenomena. Quite a lot of people using Bitcoin are not doing so for practical benefits.. they're installing the software and promoting the concept as a sort of protest against the fiat banking system. Oh, and because they hate paypal.. but that's mutual.

http://susansayler.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/bitcoin-p2p-currency-the-most-dangerous-project-weve-ever-seen/

That's a pretty interesting article.. and it demonstrates the power of portraying yourself as persecuted to attract new members.

However, I think they're pretty delusional about the robustness of the system. From the paper that started it all:

If a greedy attacker is able to assemble more CPU power than all the honest nodes, he would have to choose between using it to defraud people by stealing back his payments, or using it to generate new coins. He ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules, such rules that favour him with more new coins than everyone else combined, than to undermine the system and the validity of his own wealth.

This obviously assumes the attacker is interested in profits that can be extracted from the system. An attacker who is already wealthy, and has a greater interest in undermining the system than extracting profit from it, can trivially overwhelm the network by assembling processing power - especially if the attacker already has a stockpile of processing power.

National governments obviously fall into this category, so if they ever decide to destroy Bitcoin they won't need to issue any bans or even tell anyone.

I'm sure you can think of some other potential attackers who have the capability.

Bitcoin is stupid

[mrnobo1024]

The few people who found out about bitcoin back in 2009 were able to mine a very significant percentage of all the bitcoins that will ever be created, just because there was no competition yet (back then you could create a block with on average 4 billion sha-256 hashes; now it's about a quadrillion). If they hold on to their bitcoins, and bitcoin trading becomes big, they'll be filthy rich just because they found the website before slashdot did.

I'll be staying away from doing any bitcoin transactions. Humanity does not need any more undeserving elites.