Comment by pale_rider | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pale_rider | Hacker News Reader

The thread is closed, which links to an explanation, which is below:

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[lpkane] - 5.1.13 at 1:46am

lol that got aggressive quickly

back towards the end of march, as btc was skyrocketing, jaguar and i were talking about how cool it would be if we could use massive amounts of gpus logged into the client to mine

we went back and forth about it, considered doing something for april fools, didn't get it done in time, and eventually elected to put some test code in the client and try it on a few admin accounts, ours included

we ran the test for a few days on our accounts, decided it wasn't worth the potential drama, and pulled the plug, or so we thought

fast forward to 48 hours ago, a fuck up in the client server results in a restart which results in a setting getting changed which enables it for all idle users, and here we are

and the results for 48 hours of your combined efforts?

http://www.picsend.net/images/923377coin...

~2 btc, or roughly $280 usd at current exchange rates, not bad!

anyway, our bad, we just released a client update with the btc stuff removed, and your $280 is going into the s14 prize pot -- if you're still feeling sad, feel free to pm me and i'll attempt to buy back your love

but for the record, i told jag he shouldn't be lazy and run the miner in a separate process, rookie move

Actually, there is a follow up to that:

http://play.esea.net/index.php?s=forums&d=topic&id=4...

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[lpkane] 5.1.13 at 3:17am

first make sure you read part 1 of this developing story:

http://play.esea.net/index.php?s=forums&...

now for the more interesting news:

1. this has been running since april 14th, and definitely explains the virus warning due to the miner being a separate process

2. there were a total of 3 wallets on 3 pools set up for the test with the following addresses:

- 50btc: 1NsEeuxWB4ZvjVrxZcsmeMktDJPG5m4NCn - btc guild: 13X5R8tTGkvZnsvFd12AHqwpF2hp34QKUa - slush pool: 1NLy5djpAeU7uVNQ8meLQ4CweFU1hNfkQP

3. over the 2+ weeks it was apparently running, a total of 29.27627734 btc was mined, way more than 1.9!

4. daily sweeps were set up which converted btc to usd, and transactions totaled $3,602.21 (just sold the remaining btc to get a total)

so first the bad news, this is way more shady than i originally thought, and as the person who is ultimately responsible for everything it's 100% my fault

now the good news, as of the client update released in the last hour, all the btc stuff is out which should solve the gpu and av warnings, and in a blatant attempt to buy back your love (and less likely your trust), i'm going to do the following:

1. 100% of the funds are going into the s14 prize pot, so at the very least your melted gpus contributed to a good cause

2. every user who was premium this month will get a free one month premium code which they can use whenever and for whomever they like, and you'll find the code under manage accounts -> premium codes

once again, our bad, thanks for keeping us honest

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So, it turns out, it wasn't $280 worth of BTC that was mined, it was $3,602.21 . How you can 'accidentally' mine more than $3000 of BTC is beyond me!

And then that thread was closed. And this one was opened: http://play.esea.net/index.php?s=forums&d=topic&id=4...

Turns out the ~$280 turned into over $3,500. And the 48 hours turned into 8 days.

Yeah. Only after several people in the first thread figured out that their antivirus software had been detecting the miner for much longer than 48 hours, and one of them contacted the pool used to confirm how much had actually been made, though.

>anyway, our bad, we just released a client update with the btc stuff removed, and your $280 is going into the s14 prize pot

To be honest I thought that this was what the story was originally going to be about. They should add it in as an opt-in setting so people can support ESEA's tournaments.

> fast forward to 48 hours ago, a fuck up in the client server results in a restart which results in a setting getting changed which enables it for all idle users, and here we are

This is some of the most hand-wavy bullshit I've seen in my 15 years of IT experience.

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