[Tyr]

tbh I am simply planning a massive, nationwide surprise party for the IRS. If I let them see the transaction history for 50,000 kazoos and a suspiciously large amount of industrial-grade glitter, it ruins the "surprise" when I finally audit them instead

[Rsynced]

Not bad at all, I wonder how hard it'd be to get like 5,000 slaves. I never got into that whole RAT game so I don't know much about spreading & stuff.

idk, I just hobby mine on all my home computers.

[SUI-3183372]

How big would the bot net have to be for them to generate millions?

How high end are your bots. Average PC's or a bunch of high end rigs?
Do we care about electricity costs? I assume not if we're talking bots.
Do we want to make any assumptions to the average time each bot is online every day?

Making a few assumptions, such as we have a botnet of good to great PCs only, that we don't care about electricity costs, and that the PC's average uptime is 12 hours per day....

Then you'd need about 500,000 bots.

This calculation assumes that your bots would generate on average 5000H/s. Your average PC will generally land in between 1000H/s and 5000H/s. There are far more lower end PC's out there that will get < 1000H/s than PC's pushing 5000H/s+, but for the sake of this we'll just say the average is 5000 (Which is quite generous).

For context, no modern botnets reach 500,000 bots nowadays. Maybe some IOT nets are reaching this scale, but that's another discussion entirely, you lose a lot of mining potential on weak IoT devices.

Making $1m botnet mining isn't really feasible, but that's not to say that it's not profitable. It is certainly profitable if you have a large enough network of PCs, even better if they're high end PCs.

Edit: I don't condone the behavior, just speaking on the economics behind it.

[Mewtwo]

How high end are your bots. Average PC's or a bunch of high end rigs?
Do we care about electricity costs? I assume not if we're talking bots.
Do we want to make any assumptions to the average time each bot is online every day?

Making a few assumptions, such as we have a botnet of good to great PCs only, that we don't care about electricity costs, and that the PC's average uptime is 12 hours per day....

Then you'd need about 500,000 bots.

This calculation assumes that your bots would generate on average 5000H/s. Your average PC will generally land in between 1000H/s and 5000H/s. There are far more lower end PC's out there that will get < 1000H/s than PC's pushing 5000H/s+, but for the sake of this we'll just say the average is 5000 (Which is quite generous).

For context, no modern botnets reach 500,000 bots nowadays. Maybe some IOT nets are reaching this scale, but that's another discussion entirely, you lose a lot of mining potential on weak IoT devices.

Making $1m botnet mining isn't really feasible, but that's not to say that it's not profitable. It is certainly profitable if you have a large enough network of high end PCs.

They’ll honestly earn more using the botnet for residential IPs than mining crypto. There’s always a high demand for proxies. 10 GB for $60, HOO LEE SHEET!

[IRLCash]

They’ll honestly earn more using the botnet for residential IPs than mining crypto. There’s always a high demand for proxies. 10 GB for $60, HOO LEE SHEET!

Never thought about that! That's a good way to make money. 😎

[SUI-3183372]

They’ll honestly earn more using the botnet for residential IPs than mining crypto. There’s always a high demand for proxies. 10 GB for $60, HOO LEE SHEET!

100%, residential proxies are a goldmine.

1. Set up free VPN service
2. Make a long winded ToS where hidden in the fine print the users of your free VPN agree to become a willing participant in your proxy network
3. Market
4. Repeat steps 1-3 10x over
5. Open up your new residential proxy service

[Phobia_]

I use privacy coins to maintain anonymity & to keep my cc details safe on the net

[Omniscient]

100%, residential proxies are a goldmine.

1. Set up free VPN service
2. Make a long winded ToS where hidden in the fine print the users of your free VPN agree to become a willing participant in your proxy network
3. Market
4. Repeat steps 1-3 10x over
5. Open up your new residential proxy service

Oh snap. I didn't put that together.

[SUI-3183372]

Oh snap. I didn't put that together.

It's how 911Proxy maintained their network (Link)

Should generally assume that any [non-reputable] free VPN is simply a gateway for that VPN provider to utilize your network for nefarious purposes.