I read the white paper, I haven't read this entire thread.


My initial problem with the paper was the following:

1 - I don't know of any active botnets working over the gpu.  If they did I suspect that pc users would note the high amounts of heat and active cooling fans and request a fix from however supports their hardware
   a - almost all of the mining is don by gpu now (soon to be fpgas), in other words you would need about 50 standards botnet pc's using their cpu to equal one miner with a gpu
   b - for a perspective of the current cpu power in bitcoin the current fastest networked government owned super computer produces about 4.7 pflops where as the bitcoin community is beyond 53.5 pflops (factor of 10 larger in processing).  to achieve 50% of this with cpu based botnets one would need to acquire 100's of thousands of systems
2 - There is no economical analysis of other values botnets can have.  ie. it may very well be more profitable to operate a botnet to brute force a bank for account access
3 - There is no analysis of the declining rate of bitcoin production.  This is not a never ending game of producing bitcoins.  To date about 40% of bitcoins have been released.  If we were flooded with mass amounts of botnet gpu's it would help to secure the block chain, and also automatically enable competition/incentive for other botnet owners to move into the space (again securing the block chain further), it would cause normal users to exit the market (non-botnet operators), and create a renaissance of new mining innovation