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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
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?!
no, why would they?
Gold mined by slaves is still gold, and I guess the same applies here.
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
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.
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.
That's nothing. I'm working on malware that will skim .00001 of every bitcoin that's mined by a GPGPU and send it to an offshore account.
Scratch that. An off-planet account.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Good god, the "not backed by anything" argument again. Please come up with something that has at least a tiny contact with reality. Bitcoin has been criticized enough that you should be able to find a relevant criticism fairly easily with google.
Modern currencies typically aren't backed by anything. They only have value because people trust they have value. This works just fine for established currencies and we've already seen it works surprisingly well even for extremely tiny currencies like bitcoin.
The main advantage of a pool is the steady payout. You get paid a small share of the solved blocks a few times an hour instead waiting weeks to get the payout for entire block. Typically your pool account with allow you to claim you bitcoins every 24 hours. Botnets are going to be comprised of many horribly weak miners (probably CPUs not GPUs) and even a huge botnet won't be able to solve a block in 24 hours. The incentive to use a pool is the same for those mining on a botnet as those mining on their own hardware.
We really need your help
http://www.gofundme.com/help-sherry
They're backed by the resources, goods, and services of the issuing nation.
In many cases, those "issuing nations" are deep in debt and have a vested interest in inflating their debt away.
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...
You're wrong.
Modern currencies are backed by the governments which issue them. More bluntly, modern currencies are backed by modern government's ability to tax the labor of their citizens and imprison them if they do not pay. You trust that the currency is worth something in part because of the trust that everyone places in the currency itself (the prices that people set for goods), but also because the government buys services and goods (labor and goods), sells rights and services (user fees, police service, defense), and transacts in that currency (meaning that citizens of that government pretty much need to transact in that currency, at least in part, as well).
BitCoin cannot imprison me if I do not pay it in bitcoins. BitCoin does not inconvenience me in the least if I refuse to accept it. BitCoin only marginally inconveniences me if I decide not to pay for goods using it. BitCoin is not "backed by anything" tangible, such as gold, or practical, such as a need to use it. There's your substantial contact with reality.
That is so, so true. But then, any currency without built-in devaluation of some type only leads to hoarding.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Like gold? All gold does is make it difficult to print extra money. Bitcoin does that too. Try again.
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.)
Of all places, Urban Dictionary has a surprisingly compact explanation and rebuttal on the topic, for those confused by the tangential reference. (Humour may have been involved; I'm not sure any more.)
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
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.
Some of the currency is being generated illegally.
No, it is not.
There is no such thing as illegal generation of bitcoins. Sure, the illegal access of systems is connected to the generation of bitcoins, but that connection has nothing to do with legality.
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.
... and nothing of value was lost.
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
Modern currencies are backed by the banks which issue them.
FTFY. Most "currency" in circulation these days is just numbers in bank accounts. Which arrived there as deposits paid from loans or credit cards. Backed by the bank's asset ledger, which includes a significant percentage of housing loans...
Cash, printed and / or issued by the government or central bank is insignificant in comparison.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
But if the price of gold were about gold's industrial and medical applications, it would cost a small fraction of what it actually does. Besides which, how do "industrial applications" provide more of a "real" value than the jewelry industry?
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
"Bitcoin doesnt have a problem except for the fact that some people are doing something illegal (owning/operating a botnet) and their work on said botnet is related to Bitcoins."
And the Silk Road
And the various exchange-related losses, scandals and frauds.
And the lack of various features of a decent monetary system
And the lack of anything to do with BTC that's not Silk Road related or buying a BTC badge.
And a load of other things.
"There was a news article about $500,000 that was spent on heroin from Guatemala. This certainly calls into question the practicality of the us dollar"
Who said anything about practicality? I said reputation.
if there were a botnet out there designed to crack into a secret, encrypted NSA document for unscrupulous purposes, would you be here arguing "boy the NSA sure is in the tank, they are out there illegally botnetting peoples computers all criminal like and shit"?
Yeah, neither of your analogies actually map to the situation very well.
Generation of bitcoins via illegal means brings the bitcoin ecosystem into further disrepute. Not a lot of people know about it, of those that do an awful lot see it associated with criminal behaviour and libertarian/objectivist/separatist crazies with a hard-on for tax avoidance and poor grasp on reality.
This trojan adds to that picture.
The most important one is that the creation of a bitcoin is *not* backed by anything. It burns computational power for nothing.
In general, it helps to have some understanding of a system before criticising it, otherwise you risk looking like an idiot.
Bitcoin does not burn computational power for nothing. The computations have a very specific purpose: to make it infeasible for an attacker to double-spend bitcoins. All that CPU power is dedicated toward securing the network.
This also gives bitcoins value beyond that assigned by speculators. Securing a distributed digital currency requires a lot of processing power. The more processing power you spend on it, the more resistent it is to double-spending attacks. Bitcoin already has the equivalent of millions of dollars worth of computing power embedded in its block chain - any competing distributed currency would have to start from scratch.
You're wrong.
Modern currencies are backed by the governments which issue them. More bluntly, modern currencies are backed by modern government's ability to tax the labor of their citizens and imprison them if they do not pay. You trust that the currency is worth something in part because of the trust that everyone places in the currency itself (the prices that people set for goods), but also because the government buys services and goods (labor and goods), sells rights and services (user fees, police service, defense), and transacts in that currency (meaning that citizens of that government pretty much need to transact in that currency, at least in part, as well).
BitCoin cannot imprison me if I do not pay it in bitcoins. BitCoin does not inconvenience me in the least if I refuse to accept it. BitCoin only marginally inconveniences me if I decide not to pay for goods using it. BitCoin is not "backed by anything" tangible, such as gold, or practical, such as a need to use it. There's your substantial contact with reality.
If you think US Dollars have value because the US Government can force people to accept them, you're very confused. I grew up in third world countries where they were always highly valued because they retained value better than the local currency. The value in a currency is simply the result of confidence. The more confidence people have in a currency system, the more value it has. The confidence may be inspired by economic power, military power or simply a shared delusion.
More simply, if you can trade something for something else of value, that thing has value. Since you can trade Bitcoins for US Dollars, they have value in exactly the same way Dollars do. If people have experience trading Bitcoins for other things of value, they will gain confidence in it. It's not inevitable that Bitcoins become acceptable payment for most things, but there's also nothing fundamental preventing that.
Yeah, it's backed by the assumption that you can hand them in and get something you want. Nobody in their right mind believes that to be true of bitcoins and that's why nobody (statistically speaking) wants to receive them. Well, that's one reason, anyway. There's plenty of other reasons to dislike bitcoins.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
No, you didn't fix that for me. You broke it with your utterly incorrect conception of how a currency works. Banks do not create a currency or even back it. Banks take in currency and loan currency. The only assets a bank has are property that it has bought in exchange for currency -- by buying the asset directly or by assuming ownership of the asset because the currency that it already lent was not repaid.
People who use "FTFY' more often then not need to be bitch-slapped. Prove that it was broken first, numbnuts.