f you've been reading the most recent news from the interwebs, you probably heard that Bitcoin is on a rollercoaster.
If you're not familiar with it, Bitcoin is a global online currency, the cash of the Internet. It has no central regulator and no authority: it's a decentralized system where technology is in control.
Bitcoins are generated by the people part of its network. Generating, or better "mining", Bitcoins requires your computer to perform an expensive cryptographic computation that, combined with a proof-of-work system, ensures that the user spent a certain amount of time and CPU power for each new coin. The global availability of Bitcoins affects the difficulty and cost of performing such computations.
In this way Bitcoin regulates its own growth and distribution in the same way that we do with other limited resources such as gold and silver.
Bitcoin is controversial. It's an independent currency that no government or legal authority has control over, making it an interesting technological, social and economical experiment of the last years. However, it's also an investment: people are buying and selling Bitcoins all the time on stock exchanges like every other traditional currency.
As a consequence, an arms race started with people clustering GPU and FPGA boards to be able to mine at a higher rate and sell the Bitcoins to make an actual profit. Over the last two years, this approach drew the attention of cybercrooks who started using their botnets to run Bitcoin miners and introduce an additional source of income to their business.
read more........https://community.rapid7.com/community/infosec/blog/2013/04/12/botnets-and-the-war-on-bitcoin