prescience
heh. imagenius. a while ago i speculated someone was running a botnet to mine bitcoins. turns out, someone is. and yeah, stealing from other people is bad. in this case they're stealing electricity. so it's kinda minor. course running a gpu full blast 24/7 is kinda hard on the card. so they'll need to be replaced. most are also pretty darn loud. which should make it really obvious to the mark that something's wrong. course most victims are in denial. otherwise they wouldn't be victims. anywho, if the botnet operators weren't using your hardware to mine bitcoins, they'd be using your hardware to spam us with shrink-your-tummy and grow-your-penis emails. or they'd use your hardware for ddos attacks. or for cracking passwords. so if they're mining bitcoins instead, that's a win for society. they're doing something useful. by some definition. it's possible bitcoins will catch on as a legitimate currency. i don't think so. though i think the next generation of bitcoins has a pretty good shot. ie bitcoin 2.0. the system relies on thieves and criminals to manage your currency by exploiting the foolish. heh. so not much different from the current banking system, eh?