The question I'd like to know is why on EARTH are they running a gigahash rig through a pool... Surely that's enough to solo mine extremely profitably for the foreseeable future?
They'd have to set up a wallet somewhere and point all those (thousands?) clients there.
And the wallet being somewhere on a computer they can trust, would potentially mean that they could be traced.
Aha I see now. So basically what it comes down to is it's most likely a botnet or other illicit group of machines, and having it point at a mining pool stops the owner being accountable for their connections. I don't see why they don't use P2Pool if trust is such an issue. That would fairly immediately stop the network being so close to a mess all the time, and almost nobody's fees are high enough to make it pay out less.
It could also just be someone who is looking to burst mine every once in a while when they get a block of compute from a provider like amazonaws. Or they run another cluster that mines when other cores aren't in use.
But in that case, surely it would make a lot more sense to mine legitimately, rather than pushing so much hashing power onto a pool which is already perilously close to owning over 50% of the network... I mean, a single machine on any cloud host could provide a private P2Pool node to mine on. It just seems very suspicious to me is all, considering where they're choosing to mine.
Burst mining also doesn't make sense because coinmine is PPLNS not PPS. It's an incredibly inefficient way to mine if you're only using it in bursts.
