Am I Mining to Somebody? | Hacker News Reader

Am I Mining to Somebody?

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71 pointskinduff50 comments

Cryptocurrency is one of the worst techs to be developed in recent years. It essentially monetized the practice of wasting CPU/GPU cycles. This in turn gave new incentives to malware writers, scammers, and generally just greedy opportunistic people to waste CPU/GPU whenever possible and as sneakily as possible...

> $NewThing is one of the worst techs to be developed in recent years. It essentially monetized the practice of $DoingBadStuff. This in turn gave new incentives to malware writers, scammers, and generally just greedy opportunistic people to $DoBadStuff whenever possible and as sneakily as possible...

I'm sure people said the same thing about the Internet when it became popular. In fact, I know people still say this about the Internet to this day.

But enough off-topic, what does this have to do with this particular Docker image?

> chazragg: I'm not sure why docker is showing this as the most popular when itzg's images have over 100m downloads with 1.3k stars.

> gamb1t9: i think cuz my man uses the username 'minecraft101', it's a better match than itzg.. rather crap search design by DockerHub

This really does seem to be the case. Searching for "minecraft", itzg/minecraft-server (100M+ download, 1.3k stars) is under two minecraft101 uploads (10K+ downloads, 0 stars) and minecraftly/proxy (2.9K dls, 1 star). Interestingly, itgz beats out minecraftlinux/ci-xenial by minecraftlinux (1.1k downloads). I have no idea what the heuristic is here...

I think "Official Images" go at the top of the search, and I can't think of any other popular containers where the name of the container doesn't match the name of the uploader, but there's probably something here...

I mean it's the minecraft docker image, at least the scammer has a developed sense of irony

I don't understand, could you explain?

Edit: Ah, you mean because of mining; true, makes sense.

And the image publisher is one crafty son of a bitch

They are not even trying to be sneaky about it. If you look at layers #42 and #43 at [0], you can see they are cloning and building xmrig/xmrig [1].

[0] https://hub.docker.com/layers/minecraft101/minecraft-server/...

[1] https://github.com/xmrig/xmrig

using that page on a desktop environment makes me feel like docker actively wants to hide the steps their hosted docker containers take

i had to scroll up and down every time after clicking a line just to see what was obscured by the 80-character limit imposed on my 21:9 screen

And their file is even detected by ClamAV as "Multios.Coinminer.Miner-6781728-2". Too bad that Docker Hub doesn't scan its files.

Reported this non-scanning as an issue: https://github.com/docker/hub-feedback/issues/2154

Your best bet is to report it here... and then wait a year for someone to actually remove it: https://github.com/docker/hub-feedback/issues/1121

Report them and send them the energy bill.

Don't run random untrusted code from the internet on your computer folks.

Hmm... Now where to get trusted code from... And how do I get that on my modern computer again...

Obviously you use your vendor's "app store".

You can choose who to trust. Docker Hub itself has official images from project owners.

There's no official Minecraft server images.

I guess you reverse engineer all the installation .deb's, install.exe's, and .pkg's.

I wish I could get by with just Ubuntu repos, but.. increasingly less so.

No but I verify that they are signed and coming from a provider I trust.

What else is docker for?

tl/dr Yes

I wonder if this could be turned into a legitimate way of supporting open source developers? Run their docker images that have an option to configure running a miner during your down time.

Why would I spend CPU time doing useless work in order to give them strange coins that aren't money when i could just save the money and give it to them directly?

I tend to agree with you, but there's an edge case-y argument here that idle CPU is a resource that a corporation might be happy to donate to a small developer

in practice though I think it is not

An idle CPU consumes (relatively) little power. I get that you're "wasting" potential computation power, but we've spent years making auto-scaling CPUs to conserve electricity. On clouds, that CPU is probably even oversubscribed, so the idle time is already incorporated into the price. I don't even think it makes any sense in theory.

In practice it's even worse. There's not a sane company in the world that would let some random bitcoin miner run on the same host as their mission critical system anyway.

Well firstly those strange coins are pretty much money at this point. They might not be as universal as fiat, but you can 100% live a comfortable life using only crypto, albeit it might be a bit more work. Secondly I think clicking "yes" to a message saying "you want to support the developer when your computer isn't doing work for you?" Is easier than sending fiat in most cases. I do concede though that it only really makes sense if you live somewhere with cheap eletricity.

When websites tried this, the browsers started blocking “cryptominers”. It’s a very unpopular monetization plan.

I'm reasonably there doesn't exist a jurisdiction where you can pay your taxes in bitcoin.

Zug (Switzerland) accepts tax payments in bitcoin [1] starting from 2021.

[1]: https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-accepted-tax-swiss-canton-z...

Presumably because you could use your money for something else while you couldn't use your idle CPU time for something else.

1. They might want strange coins and not money.

2. Most people won’t give them money directly.

3. It’s their choice how to monetize their project. It’s your choice to use or not use their project.

Am open source developer.

Nope.

Please for the love of God don't be sitting around thinking of how to 'help' me in this way…

As someone with an admittedly very minor open source presence, NO. I'd rather get tips than have someone waste electricity (not to mention hosting costs) on my behalf.

Keyword here: consent! I cant imagine that someone would give any. So, no.

I would do this, why wouldn't you?

If you aren't using your computer, who cares. Not like you'll notice.

Tipping someone forces me to pay money I've already earned.

I can't be assed to set up a crypto miner on my laptop and manage the wallet and all that, it's not worth the few bucks to me.

But if it means making a livelihood to an open source developer, who collectively has hundreds of people doing this, yeah I would absolutely do that.

It also lets me support a larger number of devs. I realistically don't want to pay out $5/mo to dozens of devs. (Currently sponsor 4)

But if there's mining software that distributes profits against a pool of devs of my choosing, then sweet -- free money for them!

> If you aren't using your computer, who cares. Not like you'll notice.

If you aren't using your computer, you aren't pissing away 500+ watts every hour either.

On top of that, in most of the developed world, you get less money's worth of cryptocurrency out than the cost of the electricity to generate it. So if you really wanted to donate money, you'd donate more by just paying them directly than wasting power, money, and computer hardware life on generating cryptocurrency

> On top of that, in most of the developed world, you get less money's worth of cryptocurrency out than the cost of the electricity to generate it. This isn't really true. It depends on your hardware. My friend has a 3080 and was making $30-$50 a day mining eth. 3080 has a max usage at 750W, and let's say your computer in total is at 1.5KW. Average rate in US is 13 cents/KWh. Don't think Europe is much higher than. Other countries probably less. Also life expectancy decline of mining is highly over exaggerated by GPU companies so people don't buy them second hand.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

In Germany it's 30 eurocents/kWh. That's a decent electricity bill.

Obviously this would be consensual, keyword legitimate. I don't know why you can't imagine someone agreeing to support someone else with some CPU/GPU in off time.

Seems like a good idea to me.

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