[LINK] 5 Myths About Bitcoin You Need to Understand

[Stephen Loosley]

Kim writes,

> (Re) .. the raw power used by bitcoin miners. We don't yet know how to secure a
> decentralised ledger like bitcoin's blockchain without the energy-intensive mechanism. 


One increasingly popular work-around for energy requirements when mining cyrpto-currency.

Steal it.

For one example .. "Android trojan has miner so aggressive it can bork your battery"

By Richard Chirgwin 19 Dec 2017  http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/19/android_trojan_has_miner_so_aggressive_it_can_bork_your_battery/


Kaspersky researchers have turned up a strain of malware lurking in adult content and fake virus scanners, and it can run a victim's Android mobe so hard they might suffer physical damage.

The Android trojan, dubbed “Loapi”, has a modular architecture that lets it be adapted to run cryptocurrency mining, take part in DDoS networks, or bombard suffering users with constant advertisements.

<https://securelist.com/jack-of-all-trades/83470/>

The sample analysed by Kaspersky, when running a few days to mine the Minero cryptocurrency, worked their test device so hard that “the battery bulged and deformed the phone cover.”

Loapi communicates with the following module-specific command and control servers:

    ronesio.xyz (advertisement module);
    api-profit.com:5210 (SMS module and mining module);
    mnfioew.info (web crawler); and
    mp-app.info (proxy module)

The Web crawler module, Kaspersky said, “is used for hidden Javascript code execution on web pages with WAP billing in order to subscribe the user to various services”, and works in conjunction with the SMS module to send the subscription message.

Working with the ad module, the Web crawler “tried to open about 28,000 unique URLs on one device during our 24-hour experiment.”