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Comment by drakaal | Hacker News Reader

As it happens they are in buildings where they are the primary heat source, and we first started protein folding to keep the CPU's over 50% so the room wouldn't freeze in the winter.

Students Remote access the desktops so they have to be always on, and they pop in and out at all hours of the day and night we did the math heating the room with PC's was cheaper than keeping the boiler on for the entire building.

Believe it or not there are people in this world who aren't thieves.

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OK, then. I don't believe everyone is a thief, but there are clearly plenty of actual thieves, and still others who can rationalize thievish behavior if laundered through a process like mining-on-someone-else's-utility-bill.

So this lab-mining is seasonal, or someplace (one of the poles?) where the building would be uncomfortably-cold year-round without the mining? Is it hooked up to the buildings' thermostats?

Using computing waste heat for practical purposes is a good idea. Running CPUs as heating elements, I'd need more info about their efficiency for that purpose, especially if the system isn't in a control-loop with a thermostat (and ideally peak-vs-off-peak electricity pricing). My hunch is they might be cost-competitive with electric space heaters but way more costly than any non-electric boiler heating system.

Maybe the bill-payer's value for (heating + novelty + cut-rate tech support) is greater than (marginal-electric-bill). But even if that were true a while ago, the difficulty escalation makes that far less likely now, especially for CPU mining, or a process that's not ambient-temperature-influenced.

School isn't in session in the summer. They run about 6 months a year.

Electric space heaters aren't particularly safe in a High School. Kids stick stuff in them they catch fire.

And this year hasn't really started yet so it is quite possible there won't be any money in it, and we'll find some new use for the CPU. Computing Prime numbers for the NSA perhaps.

I think it's still stealing since you don't own the hardware and don't pay for the power usage. Therefore the mined coins should be property of the department/school/etc. and would help them lower costs even more. Unless you have permission to keep profits obtained from the usage of those machines.

We trade for the tech support. Which means I'm making about 1/100th minimum wage.

So, instead of folding proteins, which eventually results in benefits for all of humanity in the long term, the machines are now doing work that benefits only one person short-term.

Isn't this the exact same thought pattern we find in bank owners people protest against all around the world?

But let's not exaggerate - after all, it's just you and a handful devices. What difference would that make, right?

Folding proteins tends to benefit big Pharma, I don't feel so bad about that.

Who did SETI benefit? The Aliens?

Bit Coin which I don't really put much stock in, but thought it was fun to play with is in my mind a bad investment long term. I cash out the coins pretty regularly. But I like the idea of a unified currency. I don't like the idea of a currency you can make more of. In my perfect world there is a single currency backed by Gold that the entire world uses and you can trade your 1oz mark for 1oz of gold when ever you want.

BitCoin is closer to that than most anything else. So I like to support BitCoin for the benefit of humanity. Not because I believe it is the solution, but because I think those who think it is the solution will talk about it enough to convince those who can build the solution to do so.

That is so cool.

Did you do any research on increased wear of the hardware under load? That could be an additional cost that would start showing up only after a period of time.

Servers do this all the time. Temperature change is harder on hardware than electrons flowing through it. They get replaced every 4 years or so, so very few die of chip failure. It is not like we are overclocking them.

I work at Intel, and am involved with the "Reliability Verification" team for some of our client products. We design our chips to last 7 years when run well over the specced frequency on "viruses" that are much harder on the hardware than any realistic workload. Server teams have even stricter requirements.

If any hardware is going to see increased failure, I'm guessing it's the hard drives.

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