Employee Turns Gaming Network Into Private Bitcoin Mine
wired.com
wired.com
For those who already have GPU miners they bought for BTC, that are now becoming obsolete to FPGA and ASIC miners, the pertinent comparison is how to get the best ROI on their GPU miner - continue with BTC, switch to LTC, or just shut it off.
It's obviously better value for an individual to buy an ASIC than a bunch of GPUS, but I think you could still earn a few coins if you've got thousands of gamers with spare GPU cycles.
The problem with ASICs is that, once they get under the profit curve, they have no other usage. I can very reliably expect a 7970 to be useful for a few years at least. An Avalon, if I manage to get it, may or may not pay for itself before difficulty makes it unprofitable to run. And then it's completely useless.
Lots of hypothesis and conjectures.
FPGAs yes, ASICs no.
They are just machines or iteratively calculating sha-256( sha-256( something ) ) and they are hard-wired to that.
I've got no idea how effective this would be, but it would be an interesting experiment for an indie game dev.
Having said that - I wouldn't mind websites charging me automatically fractions of cents for reading their contents
Then again, not all content is worth reading. It should be proportional to how long you are on the site, or you should be able to revoke it manually or something. Anyhow, an interesting idea to think about and toy with.
Stealth mining is akin to theft (electricity bill), I wonder how it will be classified, legally.
Not that it matter. Current legal thinking regard consensus is a very simple one. So long the user stay on the site, then an implied consent is given to what ever the EULA says (so long the EULA page is linked in tiny text in the corner somewhere). What the cookie law in EU showed, is that there aren't enough political power at the layers below elected politician level that will enforce a strict consensus requirement on the web.
Scale is the difference.
The bit of bandwidth required for a small image and the CPU time to render it and run any associated little bits of script, is not all that significant compared to what is going on to transfer and render the content that has actually been requested.
Running someone's GPU (and/or CPU) at 100% for a time is going to be significant though, not only does it consume more noticeable amounts of electricity directly but it also generates heat which could reduce the life expectancy of the user's device and will certainly reduce the battery-life-until-next-charge of a laptop or other portable device which could be quite an inconvenience.
Of course that sort of thing already happens with flash, which is one of the reasons I have it disabled be default (or simply not installed) on all my devices, with badly written animations consuming as much CPU time as is available - though that is at least just ineptitude rather than someone deliberately abusing my kit for their own gain.
Having said all that: if sites were honest about using processing power for things like that and I could choose between ad-free but power consuming and normal sites, I'd probably pick the former on desktop and the less *PU intensive option on mobile devices.
Perhaps it is something places like Reddit could consider in their continuing effort to keep the site relatively un-ad-encumbered.
I strongly remember people doing tests on news sites. What they find was several MB of bandwidth, for each few lines of sent content. Ads was around 2500 times bigger in bandwidth, and I would not even try to imaging how much javascript run-time is spent on ads/tracking vs the graphical interface.
Sure, some sites are better and less intrusive, but is that the norm?
Want to read this article? Help us calculating 100 Gigahashes on your graphics card by simply clicking ok!
EDIT: wow has wired always been this bad? 16 trackers/ads according to ghostery, 20 according to disconnect
This being a entrepreneur tech site, it looks like there's a market for non-terrible companies providing video game-related software and services to niche multiplayer communities.
It would, however, absolutely demolish the battery. This kind of computation is pretty much directly proportional to power use, and modern smartphones are power-limited. So, if you mine at full tilt, the smartphone will drain the battery literally as fast as it can, and get really hot doing so. You can limit the hashing speed, but this will only spread the work over time. It won't change the fact that to get any good hashrate out of the system, you basically have to consume all the battery.
However, all of this is pointless because you'd need millions, possibly tens of millions of concurrent users to match a single modern $1000 mining rig. Computing sha hashes is a workload that fits special-purpose hardware really well. GP hardware simply cannot properly compete anyway. And now as ASICs are driving up the difficulty, you'd be making much less than 1$ of profit for 1$ of electricity consumed.
When I plug that into Alloscomp's bitcoin calculator [2] it says that at todays exchange rate you could expect a return of about $0.02 per month per phone (assuming they're on 24/7)
[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison#ARM
I'd be really interesting in seeing if the energy cost is lower than the average long term output. I'd be perfectly fine with leaving my iPhone plugged in all night if it meant it could generate me $x/night, where $x is greater than the electricity hit I get.
Pretty sure you'd need a huge number of users to make it worthwhile, though would be interesting for someone to do the numbers.
It could definitely get past the Apple review process, afaik it doesn't violate any developer guidelines (even though it feels wrong).
You honestly think the company would risk something like that for such a small amount of money?
I would seriously consider participating in a class-action lawsuit if this happened to me.
It's not "crashing the user's computer". The guy intentionally added hidden functionality to his company's software that he knew would cause an extremely high load on the client. It's the difference between a mistake and deliberate sabotage.
Also, "sabotage is a deliberate action aimed at weakening another entity through subversion, obstruction, disruption, or destruction". Clearly not what's going on here, and it's this kind of hyperbole I'm arguing against.