what if a virus or malware or an adware installs a bitcoin miner and starts mining on zombie machines? wouldn't that be productive?
It is technically the biggest threat against Bitcoin. The mining process validates the transactions. Transactions are grouped in blocks. The blocks are chained in one big sequence and the miners validate the block chain. Even if a rogue miner validates a block that steals coins, his fork of the block chain will not be validated by honest miners. As long as the computing power of the honest miners is above the one of…
I can think of ways to manipulate bitcoin market with large sums of money, but nothing that would make bitcoin unusable.