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5% of All Monero Currently In Circulation Has Been Mined Using Malware (bleepingcomputer.com)
An anonymous reader writes: According to a report released yesterday, criminal groups have mined an approximate total of 798,613.33 Monero coins (XMR) using malware on infected devices. That's over $108 million in US currency, just from coin-mining operations alone. This sum also represents around 5% of all the Monero currently in circulation -- 15,962,350 XMR. Furthermore, during the past year, infected devices were responsible for 19,503,823.54 hashes/second, which is roughly 2% of the entire hashing power of the Monero network. The total hashrate of roughly 19MH/s would result in approximately $30,443 per day based on today's current exchange rates and network difficulty," researchers said. "Similarly, the top three hash-rates will mine approximately $2,737, $2,022 and $1,596 per day, respectively."
Who would use such money?
Monero is one of the few cryptocurrencies out there that can still be mined reasonably well with the CPU instead of a GPU or an ASIC. That makes it a good profit center for malware authors, since almost any PC out there can mine it reasonably well.
If one uses the rule of thumb that the cost to hash for a cryptocurrency ought to be just below break-even with the reward then this is remarkable. I would assume these illegal miners are done without regard to such efficiency. If they are ten times less than an efficient miner then the cost in electricity would be $1 billion!!!. It's hard to beleive that much activity would go unnoticed. It's a bigger annual power bill than many countries.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
If I divide that by 10 cents/KW-hour then: 1 Billion dollars/ 0.1 = 1E10 killowatt hours = 1E14 Watt-hours = 11 gigawatt-years
that's the entire output of 11 gigawatt class power plants.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
another way to look at this would be to suppose most people have a PC chugging along at 100 watts. so 11 giga-watt years would be 100 million PCs running full time for 1 year. I'd assume that these PCs can't possibly be running full time. they probably go to sleep. So if they are used only 6 hours per day then multiple that by 4.
I note that all along here i've assumed a 10 fold inefficiency in the covert miners. but even if you dropped that factor it's still a lot. Moreover this is only 5% of the Monero. to get all of it multiply the total by 20, so were back to about the same values (give or take factors of 2).
The loop hole here is that some of this was mined when the mining was cheap but were evaluating the total value at the current price. You can't actually sell all that currency at once and not have the price drop. So the pirates were probably selling it off all along not hording it. Which means they did not actually make the currently captitalized value of $100 million
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
... at some point in time? How much of the money in bank accounts or 10-USD-bills was payment for some illegal activity at some point in time?
Definitely all interesting questions, but like the article headline, the answers would not really tell us much about the nature or usability of the respective currency.
With some cyber efforts to mine now needing ASIC just to get started people are looking for new ways in with the CPU and GPU they have.
Something to start for the consumer who wants to mine that still is open and has room to grow.
No halls filled with ASIC, in a nation with "free" power due to their failed developing nation exchange rate and math that can only still be done for profit on ASIC.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The analogy would need to relate to its creation process. Not its usage. Like a blood-diamond.
Man, crooks make millions of dollars and I just want to be a Congressman and make poverty go away.
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