31–40 of 87 posts
Title is somehow misleading. This is not about uncovering Monero users in the wild and exposing them which are criminals, as I first believed when reading the title. This is about detecting unwanted Monero miner on your system. But if you're already pwned that an unwanted process is already running on your system, a Monero miner is the least of your worries.
>If these cryptojackers were to mine Bitcoin or Ethereum, their transaction details would be open to the public, making it possible for law enforcement to track them down That doesn't actually matter at all. Monero is used for these purposes probably just because it's mineable only on CPU, thus viable to mine on ordinary hardware. (Bitcoin requires ASIC and Ethereum high-end GPU)
Yep. Monero is explicitly designed to remain CPU mineable, so that theoretically it remains more decentralized and mined by individuals rather than an industrial complex like bitcoin and ethereum have become. Counterintuitively, I think this also makes it more susceptible to nation state attacks, since you can easily deputize fleets of existing CPUs to 51% attack the network, whereas no nation state on the planet can…
You're not wrong, but it can be and is mined on GPUs. Not sure about the payback period though because it is very CPU sensitive and the top benchmarks are for AMD's EPYC processors which don't come cheap. An i9-12k handily mines several times more than an Nvidia GPU so GPU mining payback is also potentially slow.
At least according to the online guides it's also a losing proposition relative to the costs of electricity. So then allegedly the only way to profitably mine it is on someone else's energy and maybe their hardware too. For anyone truly seeking anonymity it seems like far less work to buy Monero from a localcoin vendor rather than mint your own, unless you have a lot of free time and hardware on your hands. Which may explain why antivirus software assumes if you're mining with xmrig, you've been pwned.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. Monero is explicitly designed to remain CPU mineable, so that theoretically it remains more decentralized and mined by individuals rather than an industrial complex like bitcoin and ethereum have become. Counterintuitively, I think this also makes it more susceptible to nation state attacks, since you can easily deputize fleets of existing CPUs to 51% attack the network, whereas no nation state on the planet can…
> no nation state on the planet can easily get enough sha256 ASIC miners to attack bitcoin What if you set up several sock puppet mining pools, all supposedly independent and in competition with each other, and beat the existing pools on fees by enough that miners join you en masse? That would take some investment on your end as you would have to run pool infrastructure at a loss. But if you are a nation state, it's…
>If these cryptojackers were to mine Bitcoin or Ethereum, their transaction details would be open to the public, making it possible for law enforcement to track them down That doesn't actually matter at all. Monero is used for these purposes probably just because it's mineable only on CPU, thus viable to mine on ordinary hardware. (Bitcoin requires ASIC and Ethereum high-end GPU)
ethash, the algo ETH uses, is memory controller bound (aka: memory hardness), not compute bound.
https://www.vijaypradeep.com/blog/2017-04-28-ethereums-memor...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are advantages of doing all those steps using Monero instead Fiat? I understand that you can hide your trances but if you buy legits things, who cares?
> what are legit things you bought with Monero its been 8 years now, I guess off the top of my head: groceries, domain names, registered agent services, compute instances, graphic design, press releases
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. Monero is explicitly designed to remain CPU mineable, so that theoretically it remains more decentralized and mined by individuals rather than an industrial complex like bitcoin and ethereum have become. Counterintuitively, I think this also makes it more susceptible to nation state attacks, since you can easily deputize fleets of existing CPUs to 51% attack the network, whereas no nation state on the planet can…
> no nation state on the planet can easily get enough sha256 ASIC miners to attack bitcoin What if you set up several sock puppet mining pools, all supposedly independent and in competition with each other, and beat the existing pools on fees by enough that miners join you en masse? That would take some investment on your end as you would have to run pool infrastructure at a loss. But if you are a nation state, it's…
Even if this was a realistic way to cause a 6 block re org..it seems like tons of work for a relatively small attack
>If these cryptojackers were to mine Bitcoin or Ethereum, their transaction details would be open to the public, making it possible for law enforcement to track them down That doesn't actually matter at all. Monero is used for these purposes probably just because it's mineable only on CPU, thus viable to mine on ordinary hardware. (Bitcoin requires ASIC and Ethereum high-end GPU)
Yep. Monero is explicitly designed to remain CPU mineable, so that theoretically it remains more decentralized and mined by individuals rather than an industrial complex like bitcoin and ethereum have become. Counterintuitively, I think this also makes it more susceptible to nation state attacks, since you can easily deputize fleets of existing CPUs to 51% attack the network, whereas no nation state on the planet can…
I guess the controllers of these botnets seem to agree that there's no reason to kill the cash cow and (aside from the fact that they're running a botnet) don't tend to act maliciously towards the network.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> what are legit things you bought with Monero its been 8 years now, I guess off the top of my head: groceries, domain names, registered agent services, compute instances, graphic design, press releases
Any reading you could recommend on Monero? Beyond wiki, subreddit, etc. Looking for more of an economics angle than cryptography angle, without generic crypto hype.
So looking up
Monero tail emission
might help, but I don't think there is more formal literate that just focuses on that, maybe some enthusiasts in university have something on SSRN
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/19/identifying-malware-by-sniff...
How can we detect it inside the browser ?
I do not think it's possible to mine using RandomX and a browser. From docs: > Web mining is infeasible due to the large memory requirement and the lack of directed rounding support for floating point operations in both Javascript and WebAssembly. So you can do whatever you want, but you will end with nothing.