Ask HN: Viability of general purpose virus on smart contracts?

I was checking the hash rate for various coins today, just to get a sense of how much computation gets used, and it was back floating at ~550 EH/s. [1] Eta, 10^18, so, ~5.5*10^20 hashes a second.

I was walking around, and thought “If I was malicious, I might want the Earth to calculate 10^20 virus calculations for me a second”

From lightly checking, it seems like there’s already a malicious smart contract market, and anti-market. [2] However, most seem to be directly targeted at the blockchain and stealing your coins, rather than general purpose virus propagation.

However, I don’t really know enough about the technicalities of smart contract processing.

Question: Is it possible to write a general purpose virus that will propagate with every hash calculation or coin transaction (any major coin, although Bitcoin’s the obvious 1st choice with 10^20 hashes a second and $1T market cap).

Possible stuff that’s not steal your wallet: bootloader, configurator, shredder, botnet link, lightweight VM, keylogger, adware, automated downloader, activity monitor, duplicator, bricker, tracert, or an exit node logger.

Is any of that stuff viable on a smart contract execution? Is this something people should have any concern about?

[1] BTC Hash rate: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/hash-rate

[2] Smart Contract Exploits, https://pixelplex.io/blog/smart-contract-vulnerabilities/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39685631

Points: 1

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