Slashdot Mirror
GPGPU Bitcoin Mining Trojan
An anonymous reader writes "Security researchers have unearthed a piece of malware that mints a digital currency known as Bitcoins by harnessing the immense power of an infected machine's graphical processing units. According to new research from antivirus provider Symantec, Trojan.Badminer uses GPUs to generate virtual coins through a practice known as minting. That's the term for solving difficult cryptographic proof-of-work problems and being rewarded with 50 Bitcoins for each per correct block."
It's actually known as mining, not minting, even though it still makes sense. :D
Would these count as counterfeit bitcoins? ;^)
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
It was only a matter of time.
A digital currency called Bitcoins, you say? Intriguing, tell me more!
"Stop failing the Turing test!" -- Dilbert
This "digital currency" sounds fascinating - I wonder why Slashdot's never covered it before?!
Actually there are a few ways that Bitcoins can be close to 100% anonymous. And this is one of them.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I'm sure the crackers will enjoy spending their virtual pennies on any of the varied goods and services available within the Bitcoin economy: herpes, home brewed acid, and yaoi themed web sites.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I'm so sure how this makes Bitcoins "inflationary". Could you explain?
We really need your help
http://www.gofundme.com/help-sherry
They generate at a fixed rate up to the defined total number of coins.
People run bitcoin mining operations to generate these coins. The thing I find amusing is that of course you don't get more coins the more computing power is dedicated to it, you get the same number. So someone that comes online with a massive botnet actually reduces the amount everyone else can claim.
I am not sure. But everybody with a little bit of real understanding should know that bitcoin is a fucked idea. It wont work, for a number of reasons.
The most important one is that the creation of a bitcoin is *not* backed by anything. It burns computational power for nothing. But just using energy to produce it does not input *value* in the same way in which printing a bill or forging a coin does not produce any value.
It only links the the will to back this money to whoever puts his name on it.
There would be a number of ways to introduce a valid digital currency, but bitcoin is just a senseless ponzi-scheme for wannabe hackers.
I'm so sure how this makes Bitcoins "inflationary". Could you explain?
errr....*not sure...doh
We really need your help
http://www.gofundme.com/help-sherry
because i appreciate it's true value:
it serves as the perfect obsession and time waster for the kind of idiots who would otherwise be commenting idiotically on our monetary policy and currency
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Well you could run a hacked version of the trojan that reported any blocks found to you. You could then trace what bitcoin addresses those coins flowed to.
Of course you'd still have all the normal problems of tracking a bitcoin transaction from there. How difficult that would be would depend on how paraniod the hacker was and whether you could get the cooperation of the major exchanges.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Anyone running a mining pool knew this was out there or should know. One account with hundreds of connections from different machines turning in a relatively small number of shares points straight to botnet activity.
We really need your help
http://www.gofundme.com/help-sherry
What is Bitcoin? For somebody whos never heard of it before, how do you describe it?
Mike Koss: Bitcoin is a digital currency. The really interesting thing about it is that it's totally decentralized. No government agency, no bank stands behind it. It was a geek by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto who started it in January 2009. He just invented a protocol and said, if you want to join me in this activity, we will all share in this new world of creating our own currency.
So how does it work, exactly? Can you give us a Bitcoin 101 on the mechanics? How do you get a Bitcoin, how is it created, and what's the economy like?
Peter Vessenes: Fundamentally, how you get a Bitcoin would be just like how you buy anything else. You could buy one online because they're digital. You can come by Startpad. Mike will sell you one, or I will sell you one. Or ten or whatever you want. The way most people are obtaining their Bitcoins is just through some economic transfer.
http://www.geekwire.com/2011/rewind-risks-aside-seattle-startup-vets-see-potential-in-bitcoin
Google says there's thousands of crackpots that support your position and dozens of fairly large economies that demonstrate fiat currency works just fine. There are more crackpots and we know that facts, just as much as elections, are determined by popular vote. However, a scientific analysis (sucks/rocks) shows fiat currency rocks by a margin of 108000 to 82700.
Of course, the fact that the world economy has gone in the shitter, can be used to argue that any economic practice inconsistent with your particular ideology (e.g. the more general concept of exchanging goods and services for money) is invalid.
All these bitcoin articles remind me of the Second Life articles they used to run here. If you had read /. back then, you'd think we all had avatars and all made millions selling virtual real estate, setting up a virtual B&M company presence, and converting our Linden dollars to real dollars(sound familiar?). My guess is all those folks are now making bitcoins...
What, did you learn to program from school advertising on a matchbook cover?
Better triple-check your code. You don't want to be off by a few decimal places.
Superman will come looking for you if Milton burns the office down.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Assets (i.e. shares of stock) have real, useful, "stuff" usually behind them.
But currency? Not even gold has that much worth outside of it's value as a medium of trade. It has certain useful properties, but those properties are all out of proportion to its currency value. (i.e. I can light fires with $100 bills, but that isn't what gives $100 bills value.) A currency is used as a medium of convenient trade in place of actual useful items.
We use currency (Gold, BitCoins, Dollars, Euros, Silver, seashells, shiny rocks, whatever) because barter of actual useful goods and services is cumbersome and is no way to run an economy.
BitCoins are a limitless source of Fail through all sorts of technical and economic problems, but "not being backed by anything" isn't one of them.
P.S. You aren't the only person to confuse assets and currency. A great number if BitCoin backers think BtC's are the Greatest Currency Ever because the value of their stash (in relation to Dollars) has jumped so much. (Hint: You don't want a currency to change in value at all, or at the least you want it to be predictable. BitCoins are neither stable nor predictable when compared to any "real" currency.)
If the botnet controllers have any brains, they will immediately sell off any bitcoins they mine to convert them into real money, thus driving down the price on the exchanges. The combined wealth of all people who believe in bitcoin is probably not increasing, as the low-hanging fruit has already been picked and all the enthusiasts have already spent all the money they can afford buying bitcoins. Thus introducing new bitcoins into the system will just dilute their value relative to the combined wealth of the community in dollars (or whatever other actual currency they use).
[quote]They generate at a fixed rate up to the defined total number of coins...you don't get more coins the more computing power is dedicated to it...[/quote] Seems to me that his would be deflationary. The more effort/work put into getting a bitcoin, the more value it has (theoretically). The mostly constant rate that they are generated disallows arbitrarily increasing the number of bitcoins in existence and thereby devaluing the currency. Inflation is the same thing as currency devaluation.
We really need your help
http://www.gofundme.com/help-sherry
I don't really see that there's any connection between the amount of work put in and the value.
It works the other way around in bitcoin - the more valuable it is, the more people will get into mining as there is a profit to be had, until such time as it becomes hard enough to mine that the profit goes out of it again.
But the effort involved isn't really a value driver as far as I can see, as there is no relation between the effort put in and the supply of coin, which is invariant. Similarly there is no continuing value to the electricity and cycles put in to generate the coin, it is gone and what's left is a chunk of information. If there was residual value then coins generated now that the generation difficulty is high would necessarily have a higher value than earlier coins, which is not the case.
They are potentially very deflationary though, as if it takes off and gets wildly popular then the value of the currency has to rise massively, there is no way to increase the supply in tune with the economy. This makes them a hoarding item, a speculative asset, rather that a currency, IMHO.
so what's the magic number of places that will take a bitcoin as payment before it becomes "currency" instead of "asset"?
The magic number is one sovereign state's department of revenue, if this comment, this comment, and this comment are to be believed.
by harnessing the immense power
.. of a Neutron Star?
Dude, chill.
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
Fiat currency: Basically every major world currency is by fiat now. There are good arguments both ways, but if you feel strongly about this, I hope you keep all your assets in gold instead of USD, which isn't backed by anything.
CPU: The CPU/GPU cycles aren't wasted. They provide the security for BTC by making it computationally infeasible to double-spend (you'd need to out-compute the rest of the network). If you know a better way to do this in a decentralized way, speak up!
Why BitCoin and Slashdot: Because it's the intersection of the networking, cryptography, economics, freedom from central authorities, and futurism. Perhaps you don't care, but collectively, it's stuff we're interested in. I don't suggest BitCoin as an investment (the value is driven more by speculation than need at present - you'll lose your shirt unless you have experience in forex and penny stocks), but it's absolutely an interesting topic for discussion - even if only so we can find the flaws and start thinking about how to start Bitcoin2 without them.
Disclosure:
My present holdings: < 5BTC
My market position: no orders open or planned
My business: The making and selling of physical goods and services (legal, non-BTC-related)
My goal: a stable, international currency with no central authority taking a percentage of every sale I make or controlling my funds
I love how people on slashdot will comment on something they know nothing about. First of all, a correction. It's called mining, not minting. Secondly, a fairly high end GTS450 will get 40 million hashes per second which is nothing. You need a very specific set of radeon 5000 or 6000 series card(s) like my 5830 which gets 320 million per second and costs a mere $130. CPU mining on my i5-2400 gets 12 million per second so that's absolute crap. So the virus is costing more in electricity than it receives in profits but it doesn't pay for electricity which I guess makes it worth it.
By the way, what's the US dollar backed by? What are most of the currencies in the world backed by? They're all backed by the fact that people know other people will accept them for goods and services and the fact that you can exchange them for another currency. That's true for bitcoins as well. They're at around $10.80 US per bitcoin right now and that's set 100% by unrestricted free trade at the exchanges. You can turn BTC into USD in under 24 hours for free with a wire transfer for this entire month and at a $5 fee after this month (since they had technical problems with Bank of America) and if you wanted a printed check mailed, that's free permanently. That alone is creating value because epople know they can always get "real" money for their coins. I've personally bought some nice cabling and computer parts with BTC and sold even more for BTC. No bullshit ebay and paypal fees or locked paypal accounts or massive delays or anything. You just send a payment and it's instant and free. You don't have to prove your address or be over 18 or any of that whole song and dance. So yeah, people are using it, they're continuing to use it, and the overall usage volume since last year has increased by about 100x and at least 10x since May. Oh anf FYI, a lot of mining rigs are running partially or completed on solar and wind so don't forget that.
You better get used to it or at least read up on how it works before you hate on it because it's not going anywhere and you'll probably eventually be using it.
it talks about the *chemical* reactivity of gold when the explanation was referring to the nuclear reactivity of gold. It then talks about the radioactive decay of gold when normal gold (Au196) doesn't decay at all. Not that I'm proposing the explanation is right, just that the rebuttal is wonky.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=gold+&a=*MC.gold+196-_*Isotope-
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Bitcoin will be the perfect currency for the libertarian paradise out in the ocean.
In which case: all the money that's being hoarded ends up out of circulation, which means that the economy would stagnate. And how is that a good thing again? Because you learned that 'saving is good' from having a piggy bank as a kid, and that's where your understanding of economics ended?
I fail to see how this has any impact on the BTC network stability -- in fact, they're only helping to make the network more secure. The only known vulnerability in the network is the threat of someone being able to write blocks faster than all the other non-cooperating nodes, which means single-handedly controlling more than 50% of the entire global bitcoin computation. The more miners there are, the harder this is.
The more direct threat here is if the botnet itself approaches 50%+ of the network. But as it is, the global computation rate is high enough that you'd probably need a few million computers in your botnet to even get to the same order of magnitude as the rest of the network.
As for complaints about "illegal bitcoins," there's nothing to see here. Do people lose confidence in USD everytime someone robs a bank because there are "illegal" dollars in the wild? No, money is money, bitcoins are bitcoins. The problem/illegal part was the person robbing the bank or unauthorized access to people's computers to create a botnet. They're still legit Bitcoins. The only threat to the network is as someone else said: the people controlling the infected computers are probably dumping the coins on the market right away to convert it to cash, which will lower the price slowly over time. And other miners (like myself) will make a few less milli-BTC per day for our watts...
It's really a shame that Bitcoin is getting such negative press. It has real, legitimate and web changing possibilities if it drops the negative associations and begins to become legitimate. In particular, it would allow anonymous micro-transactions without a per-transaction fee. This could be HUGE for web developers, designers, bloggers and anyone who works online for a living. It would allow us to bypass the big advertising networks and get money directly from our customers with little-to-no transaction fees and no dangerous exchange of information. Yes, it's true that users won't spend $1.00 to read or donate to your blog. But they might spend 0.00005 BTC. If bitcoin transfers were so easy to do and integrated into your browser (perhaps with a
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. - Hunter S. Thompson
I reported that Symantec were blogging about this back in June
Here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2159376&cid=36158738
A lot of noise was made by the BitCoin Apologists that the value of any given BitCoin would match the cost of the resources it took to produce, making it the ultimate in fair, distributed currency, and no one could flood the market because it wouldn't be worth overproducing, right?
The catch is, of course, that it's possible to steal those resources pretty easily. I have to wonder why we wouldn't just assume that BitCoins are all mined by botnets, since the only way to make money mining bitcoins is to steal the resources from someone else.
Because they're increasing the money supply, and that is a primary driver of inflation?
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
True, you are just stealing power and cycles. I think the end result is that a) all BitCoins are assumed to be mined with stolen computing resources and b) BitCoin as a currency is devalued.
"Trojan.Badminer uses GPUs to generate virtual coins through a practice known as minting"
Isn't that how the `real' economy works, the gov lends non-existent money to the banks, the banks lend it to the customers and the gov mints coins to cover the transaction.
Setting up the software based on the specific type of video card you're running plus getting the connection setup through the firewall to download new blocks is something even people trying to do, have trouble with, let alone some gay trojan.
Check the release here on the blog: http://tradehillblog.com/