Re: Bitcoin vs spam?

[Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu]

On Wed, 17 Aug 2011 16:50:39 PDT, "Rob, grandpa of Ryan, Trevor, Devon & Hannah" said:

> I wonder if some botherders, possibly not as good at math, converted some of 
> their networks?

Who said anything about it being an either-or situation?  If you got a botnet
client on a machine that has a graphics card that supports CUDA, you can be
doing a lot of Bitcoin mining during all those pesky 50-60ms RTTs you keep
hitting on the network when trying to deliver spam. And even if you don't have
CUDA, you should still be able to do a lot of computations if you don't care if
the machine's owner wonders why the fan is on a lot.  Probably want to avoid
Bitcoin mining if the machine is running on battery power, that's kinda
self-limiting.

15 years ago, I was managing to do well over 1M RCPT TO's a day on an IBM
RS6K-220, which had a whole whopping 66Mhz PowerPC chip in it. And even with
only 66Mhz pushing it, the big constraints were network latencies and timeouts
and disk performance (do you know how many time Sendmail will end up invoking
fsync() if you hit a timeout trying to reach a host? Lots.)

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