Why would a malicious malware botnet dev choose to mine a more difficult to mine, and thus less profitable crypto currency, when their botnet could instead be mining a much more profitable coin with their botnet?
I won’t argue that ransomware often asks for payment in monero, because monero is actually difficult to track and deanonymize, but ransomware and a distributed mining botnet are not the same thing.
Why would a malicious malware botnet dev choose to mine a more difficult to mine, and thus less profitable crypto currency, when their botnet could instead be mining a much more profitable coin with their botnet?
I won’t argue that ransomware often asks for payment in monero, because monero is actually difficult to track and deanonymize, but ransomware and a distributed mining botnet are not the same thing.
They wouldn’t? Monero is more profitable for botnets than bitcoin because it (deliberately) doesn’t require specialized hardware.
Who was talking about ransomware? Maybe I’m missing some context here.
There is a whole universe of coins beyond BTC and Monero, and many of them are more profitable to mine with non ASIC hardware than Monero.
Like which ones? Monero is the biggest one I’m aware of that has mining but no ASICs.
https://minerstat.com/mining-calculator
Right now, there’s about 75 coins/pools/mining methods that are more profitable from a pure mining perspective than XMR… with just an Nvidia 3080.