Chinese Hackers Mined $800k Worth Siacoin Hiddenly

According to the police, hackers in collusion with serving companies hacked 100,000 computers in Internet cafes in 30 Chinese cities

19 June 2018 2004

In China, 16 people were arrested who earned $ 800,000 on the illegal mining of Siacoin cryptocurrency in the Internet cafes in dozens of Chinese cities, CoinDesk reports.

According to the police of Chinese Ruian (Zhejiang Province), hackers in collusion with serving companies hacked 100,000 computers in Internet cafes in 30 Chinese cities . Their income was 5 million yuan ($ 800,000).

Hackers used a malicious program that used the computing resources of infected devices to extract Siacoin crypto currency. Malicious software was sold to employees of computer maintenance companies who could download it to a PC in an Internet cafe during scheduled checks.

Suspicions arose in July 2017, when employees of Internet cafes in Ruyan noticed that their computers began to work very slowly. The CPU performance dropped by 70% even after the reboot.

Around the same time, the price of Siacoin according to CoinMarketCap grew by 400% from $ 0.002 in May to more than $ 0.01 in July. Accounts for utility services of Internet cafe Ruiana during this period also significantly increased. This caused their owners to contact the police.

Most Internet cafes in Ruian were served by one company. Its executive director was arrested in August last year, and disclosed information about hackers.

Mining Bitcoin Blockchain

Developers to Combat Bitcoin Mining Cetralization

Stratum V2 mining protocol will significantly change the principles of functioning of bitcoin mining

03 December 2019 83

The mining company Braiins has provided instructions for using a code that can make the Bitcoin mining process more decentralized, CoinDesk writes. It is expected that Stratum V2 will significantly change the principles of functioning of bitcoin mining and will help increase the safety and efficiency of mining pools.

More comprehensive than BetterHash, individual job selection, zero time backend switching. If this protocol does everything it promises, "mining centralization" as an argument will be completely dead.

Jimmy Song

Developer, Bitcoin

Matt Corallo of Square, who made a significant contribution to the development of the protocol:

This is huge for mining centralization. Instead of being focused on the centralization of pools (which is the world we're in today), we can focus on the centralization of actual miners [and] farm owners!

Matt Corallo

Bitcoin developer, Square

Last year, Corallo introduced the BetterHash protocol, which became his own plan for decentralization of mining. Now Braiins and Corallo decided to put their know-how together to present a more effective solution.

Individual miners often pool in order to smooth out the negative effect of the uneven distribution of rewards. This has led to the fact that today only three mining pools control over 50% of the computing power of bitcoin and can directly affect which transactions are included in the blocks.

To prevent this situation, Stratum V2 uses a model that changes the relationship of the miner with the mining pool. In the proposed system, the decision about which transactions to include in the blocks is made by miners, not pools. In addition, the individual right to vote in determining the vector for the development of bitcoin is returned to individual miners.

However, the developers note that mining pools interested in censoring transactions may simply refuse to install Stratum V2, and the problem of centralization consists in the production of equipment, which so far is concentrated in the hands of several large players.

To induce the use of Stratum V2 mining pools should the advantages offered by the protocol in the context of reducing costs, preventing attacks and limiting the possibility of theft of computing power. Now developers are completing the preparation of their solution, but it is already available for testing. It is expected that in the case of a favorable attitude of mining pools, their transition to Stratum V2 will require at least 12 months.