{"id":58,"date":"2014-02-07T12:17:28","date_gmt":"2014-02-07T12:17:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/camille\/?p=58"},"modified":"2014-02-08T01:32:58","modified_gmt":"2014-02-08T01:32:58","slug":"%e2%97%93-cryptophilanthropy-voluntary-botnet-bitcoin-mining-fundraising","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/camille\/2014\/02\/07\/%e2%97%93-cryptophilanthropy-voluntary-botnet-bitcoin-mining-fundraising\/","title":{"rendered":"\u25d3 Cryptivism: Voluntary Botnet Bitcoin Mining Fundraising?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A theoretical question on my mind: has anyone ever tried putting a voluntary botnet at work to mine crypto-currencies for philanthropic fundraising purposes?\u00a0<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Botnets mining bitcoins (botcoins!) is no new idea. Though usually there not\u00a0voluntary\u00a0<\/em>botnets, and they mine for profit, which makes it a criminal activity. See ZeroAccess<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0for instance. Or ESEA, the gaming company that got caught<\/a> mining behind its user’s backs (“serious gamers like ESEA\u2019s customers made excellent soldiers for a botnet army: Gaming machines have powerful graphical processing units that are pretty good at bitcoin mining”). They got sued for it in the States, which gives us a nice peak into a legal discussion around non-voluntary botnet bitcoin mining.<\/p>\n

Bitcoin mining by voluntary botnet for for-profit purposes also seems to have been tried but in more or less shady ways, see Security researchers\u00a0<\/span>Brian Krebs<\/a> and <\/span>Xylitol<\/a> on\u00a0<\/span>FeodalCash, which promised to make your computer work in the botnet and gives you shares of what has been mined:<\/span><\/p>\n

“Dear slave masters, check your wallets you should have received your shares now.
\nWe are glad you’re working with us.
\nRegards, FeodalCash”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If you trust an organization enough that you would join their voluntary botnet, which would be like saying “Hey, I trust you, here is a little it of my computer power, we can do a lot together”<\/em>, then theoretically this organization could mine its way through a successful fundraising campaign.<\/p>\n

I wonder how many groups have access to voluntary<\/em> botnets though: botnets that people have willingly joined. I can think of Anonymous’\u00a0Low Orbit Ion Cannon,\u00a0LOIC<\/a>, but I’m sure there are many smaller initiatives, like\u00a0Computer Science labs whose students would have formed voluntary botnets (and who could mine for pizza?).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I also wonder how profitable the operation would be. Bitcoin entrepreneurs friends suggested that, in the current setting, putting a botnet of one million computers at work on the basis that they would mine when they’re not used by their users for other purposes would bring $50 000 a week. Research on botnet mining bitcoins (see this paper<\/a> for instance) suggests that other sorts of cryptocurrencies would be more profitable to bot-mine. It seems very hard to model returns predictably.<\/span><\/p>\n

There are a couple other challenges on the NGO’s side, for instance it’s not always easy to accept bitcoin donations. See EFF’s complicated bitcoin donation story<\/a>. That being said, there is an impressive list of organizations<\/a> that would accept bitcoin donations.<\/p>\n

So there are a couple challenges on the road, but that would be an interesting case of useful clicktivism (or cryptivism?)…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A theoretical question on my mind: has anyone ever tried putting a voluntary botnet at work to mine crypto-currencies for philanthropic fundraising purposes?\u00a0 Botnets mining bitcoins (botcoins!) is no new idea. Though usually there not\u00a0voluntary\u00a0botnets, and they mine for profit, which makes it a criminal activity. See ZeroAccess\u00a0\u00a0for instance. Or ESEA, the gaming company that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6239,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/camille\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/camille\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/camille\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/camille\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6239"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/camille\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/camille\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/camille\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions\/61"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/camille\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/camille\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/camille\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}