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Thread ID: 130405 2013-04-09 03:57:00 Bitcoin and Skype Trojans? Cato (6936) PC World Chat
Post ID Timestamp Content User
1336070 2013-04-09 03:57:00 www.bbc.co.uk
Skype trojan to mine bitcoin?

Sounds interesting.

Could someone please educate myself and other as to what exactly bitcoins are? What they can be used for?
Cato (6936)
1336071 2013-04-09 04:03:00 Bitcoins are a virtual currency.

Lots of trojans mine bitcoins, they do it using the GPU, and it makes money for people who are in control of the botnet.
There are also a lot of legitimate uses for the Bitcoin currency.

You'll probably find this read interesting : www.reddit.com
Chilling_Silence (9)
1336072 2013-04-09 06:41:00 I own .21% of a bitcoin.


Cool story for me :p

EDIT: Oh snap, that .21$ is worth a f**** load now!! When I mined it back in the day one BC was only $50 Nearly $200!!!
The Error Guy (14052)
1336073 2013-04-09 06:50:00 Still can decide if its a con or not plod (107)
1336074 2013-04-09 07:01:00 Yeah the price has SKYROCKETED lately.

I mined part of a bitcoin, can't remember the details though, wish I did because it'd be worth a good USD$50-ish
Chilling_Silence (9)
1336075 2013-04-09 07:20:00 Excitement over, just logged in and checked it again (it had gone up but I was an extra 0 on the wrong side of the decimal point :p 0.032xxxxxx BTC. Not bad though. Given the price I'll try to keep the miner running and see if I can get up to .5 BTC, that's worth at least $100 USD.

The chances of that happening? Slim I'd say.
The Error Guy (14052)
1336076 2013-04-09 07:25:00 Excitement over, just logged in and checked it again (it had gone up but I was an extra 0 on the wrong side of the decimal point :p 0.032xxxxxx BTC. Not bad though. Given the price I'll try to keep the miner running and see if I can get up to .5 BTC, that's worth at least $100 USD.

The chances of that happening? Slim I'd say.so how does the mining work, from what I had heard previously mining had ceased. No more to be mined.
plod (107)
1336077 2013-04-09 08:26:00 Nup, there's a semi-infinite amount AFAIK. Chilling_Silence (9)
1336078 2013-04-09 08:27:00 It's an exponential function, it gets harder but can't actually drop off entrely (although it will get to the point of why bother? too long between actually hitting anything)

Back in the day you could successfully mine coins using anything really, now you could mine by yourself using the most powerful GPU/CPU combo for years and not hit anything. It's mostly done via "pools" (effectively botnets) where each node gets a "payout" per correct block de hashed based on the % of work they completed in solving the block. So if I did 2% of the work I'd get 2% of the reward.

Have a look at slush's pool here http://mining.bitcoin.cz/
The Error Guy (14052)
1336079 2013-04-11 05:53:00 Bitcoin crashes, losing nearly half of its value in six hours:

arstechnica.com
zqwerty (97)
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