I was in a shop recently and the owner said that they will not take Scottish £20 notes because so many in circulation are forgeries. It’s not news; forging bank notes and coins has been going on for centuries. and you will know that when a forgery is detected, the note is confiscated and removed from circulation.
Whether most forged notes are captured and destroyed or whether there are a lot in circulation undetected, the governing principle is that the notes are detectable.
I mention this because there is at the moment a surge in the number of malicious WordPress plugins, Github code snippets, and other resources that are built to mine cryptocurrencies on someone else’s setup.
They are commandeering the CPU resources and electricity of the computers running sites that have unwittingly incorporated these assets.
It seems to me that mining in this way is unlike counterfeiting non-digital currency. The difference is that malicious crypto mining is like counterfeiting non-digital currency with the original plates.
That’s because there is no way to see where the mining took place. There is no ‘counterfeit’ in the old sense. There is just unauthorised, perfect reproduction.
So what value does the mined currency have?
What value ought it to have?