No one's saying these people are bad or evil - I think the main thought here is that the mining system is broken and needs to be fixed. The point of mining is decentralization, and only having one or two miners is the opposite of that.
As for talking to them, one of them hangs out on steemit.chat and has explained a lot of his/her operation over the last few months. Goes by the name of nobody in the #mining channel, and I believe is the one responsible for the gxt- accounts. Seems like a nice enough person, and knows exactly the kind of monopoly they have on mining right now.
Basically from what I've read of the conversations, this person runs 2 nodes - a miner and a witness. That single mining node (likely a custom GPU rig) is outperforming the hundreds of other people participating, combined. The only other person who stands a chance when nobody is mining is the owner of the rabbit accounts.
There were also conversations about how nobody did switch to ZCash, and still is mining there, which is why you don't see gxt names in the mining queue right now.
The idea that a botnet exists is pure speculation.
No one's going after the one or two people that are dominating the queue. This is all about NOT increasing the reward into that system. It's a system that right now is viewed as flawed by many people within the steemit community.
If you really want to talk to them, just go into steemit chat :)
Thanks. I do believe the GTX- something was just a ploy for people to believe a GPU miner was out (which really isn't). When it first showed up, everyone speculated that a GPU miner exists, and that's why there can't be any possible way of competing against them. If you convince people there is no way to compete, they stop competing, which will cause people to "stop trying". Once you do that, you can dominate the place. Which is exactly what has probably happened. :) If I were that guy, I probably would have named my bots gpu-miner-1080 instead. But by naming them GTX- something gave the illusion to people who "figured it out" that it relates to a video card, and therefore must be a GPU miner. It may not be.. it might just be a lot of computing power by a botnet with lots of cpu miners (with RAM) who use the same naming scheme to scare people off, thinking a GPU miner exists in the wild (which doesn't)..
P.S. Dan & Ned might not be too concerned, because blocks are still being solved, the chain is running fine, and new account creation by pow is now down to a minimum by the dominate rabbit and gtx and supercomputing botnets... So it's less of a problem to them than to us.
I hate it when people end a post like this by the cliche "Just sayin..."
But this time, "I'm just sayin..."
P.P.S... the alias "nobody" refers to Apache, the webserver user. Which indicates he is using hacked website accounts to pull this off. So yes, it does indicate a botnet.
Just sayin again. :) But to the botnet owner, don't attack me. I have respect for what your doing, because the design allows you to do it. If we don't lock it down, someone else would. We should lock it down, and that's our ongoing issue.