New Mac OS Trojan Produces BitCoins 247
angry tapir writes about an interesting use for malware. From the Techworld article: "A newly identified Mac OS X Trojan bundles a component that leverages the processing power of video cards to generate Bitcoins, a popular type of virtual currency. The new Trojan was dubbed DevilRobber by antivirus vendors and is being distributed together with several software applications via BitTorrent sites."
Re:A perfect storm of trolling (Score:5, Interesting)
A Mac Trojan and a Bitcoin story in one! Quick someone tie this into global warming!
What's there to tie into global warming...? Of course the production
of bitcoins uses processor or GPU, which uses electricity, which
pollutes the atmosphere cause it's the electricity from the coal plants
ONLY and not from the nuke plants... but the nuke plants are just
as bad cause they are all susceptible to tsunamis, even the inland
ones.
So, yeah, I added global warming AND nuke, there!
-AI
You laugh, and we profit. (Score:1, Interesting)
Eh, you geeks may scoff but some of us are pulling in 20-30% profits *PER DAY* trading these "silly" Bitcoins.
It really is the ultimate geek fantasy project: a completely open ended, sky-is-the-limit, world political structure changing, disruptive open source software technology.
Anyone that hates without backing it up is just trying to feed you disinformation. Bitcoin directly challenges TPTB because it puts trading power back in the hands of the people.
Re:Joke's on them. (Score:3, Interesting)
The mining difficulty has been dropping in relation to the number of miners that have been leaving the network. This is exactly how the system was designed, and it's a good thing, because now I'm making more coins than I was before. :-)
Lots of folks have mining hardware that was paid off in the $30 days and now they still run for free at work or wherever. Not everyone is paying for electricity.
Re:New Trojan produces Quantitative Easing (Score:4, Interesting)
Because bitcoins want to be free! And, and, they're like... BEER! And... noone accepts them for anything, so you can save a LOT of 'em without being tempted to spend 'em! An... an... they keep you from having to do Real Work! "Honey, don't bother me, I'm minting bitcoins!"
Re:Just works! (Score:4, Interesting)
except on the windows platform. There are still plenty that can infect without the user running it as administrator because of crapware called MS office and Adobe Reader that do not run sandboxed but run so that when they overflow they give the code root level access.
Again, it's the craptastic security model of Windows.
Re:Not popular, not currency (Score:3, Interesting)
Some of us are glad to see the price drop. I just want to send money to people without PayPal taking a cut or getting a say in who I can send it to. As such, it makes no difference to me what the price is - I can send 3 coins worth $10 or 10 coins worth $3, and it's all the same.
The price drop has crushed the "get rich quick" crowd, and good riddance. Hopefully they learned their lesson and will stay gone so the rest of us can get back to actually trying to USE Bitcoin for something, and see what it's good for.
Even if it still has terminal problems, it's a damned interesting experiment. We've already learned some important things - like, don't set your currency up so it can turn into a pyramid scheme. Hopefully that's burned itself out, and we can see what the next problem will be. The more we learn, the better Bitcoin2 will be.
A few quick debunks:
No, not all the exchanges have been hacked. MtGox (the big one) got hacked, but had adequate second-line defenses in place to contain the problem, and it didn't affect customers. Bitcoin7 was a bunch of incompetent dorks from the start. We told that to the world, but hey, some people don't listen. MyBitcoin was a wallet service run completely anonymously... I still find it unbelievable that people would give their money to some anonymous guy who promises to be really careful with it. I guess we needed the example to teach people the hard way? Those are all black eyes, but there are far more services that have been running smoothly.
Bitcoin is different from painting numbers on rocks. Anyone can paint numbers on rocks and devalue the rest of them. Bitcoins are generated in fixed quantities (500 per hour, decreasing to 250 per hour in about a year, with further decreases in the future), resulting in a small and predictable amount of inflation.
It is a currency: you can trade it for things. It might not have the same properties as some currencies you're used to, and it's quite possible it's not a good currency depending how you want to use it, but it is most certainly a currency.
Declaring it a currency doesn't destroy it through regulation. There are many non-federal-government-issue currencies operating in the United States without problem.
There IS a lot of fraud occurring. That's largely because people are used to electronic transactions being like PayPal or Visa - highly traceable and reversible. Bitcoin is much more like cash - don't give it to someone unless you trust them! That's an inherent tradeoff, but not necessarily a design flaw. Like I said, I don't want PayPal looking over my shoulder, telling me I can't send money for porn or WikiLeaks, and taking a cut for the privilege. I want something that works like cash, and I accept the responsibility that securing my cash requires! When (if?) people learn to see it that way, the fraud will decline. Again, it's not for everyone and everything, but I think it has a place.
Re:Just works! (Score:2, Interesting)