If you used to mine Monero for the past 2 months, you surely noticed a rapid increase in nethash. Discussing this with other community members the most of us agree that this brutal increase of net hash is related to botnets. Botnet-masters have found the way to monetize their huge CPU power, surely much profitable way then using it for useless or even paid DDoS attacks. Now, the Monero community is getting concerned because it seems that more then a half of the network hashrate is coming from the botnet-like structures. There are no adequate measures to isolate botnets from the network, although some pools, tend to fight the pest.
What is actually the problem with botnets?
Well, people who are not involved in mining probably are not aware of that issue, or just don’t care 🙂 In short, increased network hashpower increase the difficulty level to find a block, which automatically increases the ROI for miners and make their investment questionable. Unfortunately, the value of the crypto doesn’t seem to follow the nethash rate, so the problem is that a lot of miners wouldn’t reach the ROI threshold because of the rapid nethash spike. At the moment most of them are even not aware of this, and the other seem to be pretty lethargic having no clue on how to fight the bastards. The superbrains behind the Monero community are more focused on other problems, so this issue was pretty much neglected. However, I think this issue has to stick out as a real threat the the community and crypto in global and hopefully some solutions will emerge soon.
Other then that, governments and banks are more then happy to see any kind of a downfall signals from the crypto-world, so I think they could even be ready to encourage botnet-masters to choose that way.
Unfortunately, regular miners have to find another alternative until the issue is solved somehow, which is a pretty big challenge for the Monero community. The alternatives are even more volatile then Monero itself and do not catch much attention so far. However, the Monero nethash is likely to achieve 1G soon and the ROI for Vega miners would stretch indefinitely.
We’d like to hear what the miner community has to say about it and what could be plausible future scenarios or solutions that could solve this problem …