[LINK] Accused of infecting PCs to mine for Bitcoins, gaming company settles for $1.08m

[Robin Whittle]

Hi Stephen,

The author's use of "computers were mined for Bitcoins":


http://www.theage.com.au/it-pro/security-it/accused-of-infecting-pcs-to-mine-for-bitcoins-gaming-company-settles-for-108m-20131121-hv3pi.html.html

indicates that she does not understand Bitcoin "mining".  It involves
massive amounts of calculations, which the hundreds of cores in modern
graphics cards are quite suitable for.  These computational efforts are
rewarded with Bitcoins or fraction thereof.  So the user's computer had
nothing taken from them - no money, no private information, no Bitcoins
- the perpetrators of the scheme just used some otherwise unused
computational power, which would have marginally increased the power
consumption of the computer.

Yesterday I tried my hand at Bitcoin mining for a few hours with a few
years old graphics card, by following the instructions here:


http://www.joeydevilla.com/2013/04/15/how-to-mine-bitcoins-for-fun-and-probably-very-little-profit/

The GeForce 9800 GT graphics card was doing something like 20 to 30
million hashes a second.  After a few hours, as part of a pooled
approach to mining as explained in the above page, I earned:

   0.00000530 BTC

With a Bitcoin worth currently

  https://blockchain.info/charts/market-price
  http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD

worth about USD$700, I earned about 0.37 US cents.  Its not a way to get
rich, but with the total number of Bitcoins set at 21 million, and with
half of them "mined" already, I am happy to have made a contribution to
this potentially important global currency.

While the current price rise can be seen as speculation, I think there
may be some sound logic behind it.  If this currency does turn out to be
very widely used, then the value of a Bitcoin will need to rise to a
very much higher level, such as tens of thousands of dollars, to provide
the total value in circulation suitable for billions of people to use.

There are strong arguments for such a global currency surviving and
being widely used, including low transaction fees and freedom from
governments debasing it by printing money.  All people have to do is
believe in it, and it can happen.  Bitcoin is the front runner in terms
of acceptance, and it is easy to imagine a single currency succeeding
rather than two or three.

On this basis, buying a Bitcoin now for USD$700 makes a lot of sense.
Maybe I will keep mining and in the years to come, my accumulated reward
of 0.000xxx BTC will be worth a few dollars.

  - Robin