[Discuss] Any miners?

[Richard Pieri]

On 6/17/2017 8:47 PM, Shankar Viswanathan wrote:
> This isn't always the case. I can't find the citation right now, but 
> based on some reports I read, the recent WannaCry ransomware campaign 
> only resulted in about $150,000 worth of BTC paid into those wallets (at 
> the time of publication of that article). The variant that used the same 

Computers most likely to be affected by such malware are at best capable
of mining on the order of 0.00000001 BTC per day at 20MH/s if the
calculator I used is vaguely accurate. One hundred such nodes will net
you about 3 cents worth of bitcoin a day at Friday's exchange rate
according to Coindesk. Given the approximately 200K nodes affected by
WannaCry, if the worm were a bitcoin miner the attackers would have
netted around $60 worth of bitcoin per day. It would take 6-7 *years* of
constant mining to reach the $150K that the attackers got in about a
week. Actually, it would be longer because the difficulty of mining
bitcoins always increases which means the return for MH/s drops.

-- 
Rich P.