Is there any research on how much percentage of monero hashrate comes from botnets ? and why the randomx ram requirements are not increased to promote legitimate cpu mining by lowering advantage of botnets

Botnets are legitimate 👀

Legitimate thieves

chesterfield: no, if they have advantage over other miners ; same like asic had over cpu/gpu miners

Botnet isn’t a commodity that can be bought by anyone

If botnets are legitimate then ASICS were legitimate too

Asics are just specialized hardware. Botnets are thieves who don't pay for the resources they abuse

they could be thieving worse things

Sure, but that's not the point here

merope: Reason for going anti asic was it was not a commodity anyone can buy

there is only one point?

That doesn't make them unlawful - just more centralized

No, tomorrow govs can just ask Microsoft to push a update to mine monero and can keep attacking monero network

Technically possible? Yes. Realistic? Not so much

merope: Everything is possible, can mine at 2-3% and will be effective to 51% attack

Sure - but that's a probability you can directly calculate

Can't really calculate the mathematical probability that a government will force a private company to push a malicious software update to computers all over the world in order to perform a mining attack on a cryptocurrency

I don’t understand why increasing ram limitations to effective limit botnets is such a big issue ? Ram is readily available everywhere and extremely old hardware which don’t support high ram don’t mine with enough hashrate anyways unless they are bundled into a botnet

Currently we are paying only $50k/day to miners to secure the network, how many legitimate miners in there ?

Other than some hobby miners

What about people mining on their free college electricity

Or an Airbnb

there is monero-pow (irc roon) where this has been previously discussed

Is that not also unfair?

chesterfield[m]: Even with free power the hardware roi will in a decade

this is not really a topic for MRL

Profitable mining just incentivizes centralization

Individual miners/entities are hard to estimate. But we have ~100k-1M cpus

nioc: What was the conclusion there ? Let botnets secure the network or I would say let a few keep securing the network

chesterfield[m]: False. Profitability incentivizes mining

There is an advantage to using your brain to make Monero miners that have no hardware or electric cost

chesterfield[m]: Yah effectively promoting botnet based mining 👌

Botnets help secure the internet

😅

chesterfield[m]: Until the other side uses it

Anyone can use it

Botnets are first and foremost thieves. The fact that they "help" secure the network is just a lucky side-effect

chesterfield[m]: No, I can’t

nikg83[m]: others in -pow can answer better than I

seems that it is as it is

Wouldn’t people just use botnet to make money?

The easy way to prove it is the fact that botnets operate even when they don't cause "collateral benefits"

chesterfield[m]: Someone somewhere has to pay for that electricity at some point

And Monero mining incentivizes people giving free things to add a price

It incentivizes vps users to use more secure infrastructure

It’s not going to be this way forever

chesterfield[m]: It’s been like for eternity

* been like this for eternity

Aren’t these botnets performing cheap work for the network?

What would hashrate be if botnets disappeared

chesterfield[m]: 10%

chesterfield[m]: 10% or less, just how it feels

I think there’s just a lot of incentive to mine in clever ways in Monero that doesn’t exist in asic world.

chesterfield[m]: Again a centralisation

So now stealing is clever, and estimates are based on feelings. Prime MRL material

I consider weak security like leaving the safe door unlocked

Ah this isn’t lounge