Hacker News Reader

Comment by acangiano | Hacker News Reader

CPU mining of scrypt-based cryptocurrency is highly inefficient. Let's do some math.

A cc2.8xlarge is reported to mine at 85 kh/s, so 20 of them would give you 1700 kh/s. That's roughly equivalent to a couple of high-end AMD GPUs (say a couple of overclocked 290x). This hashing power gives you a little over 0.5 LTC per day. It mined for two days, so it gained a little over 1 LTC. Let's call it $40.

That's right, the idiot behind this cost the OP $3000+ for $40 profit. A smarter criminal would have spawn GPU instances on EC2.

View on HN

Criminals don't care how much money they're costing their victims, only how much money they'll make from their crime. This is no different than someone smashing your car's window ($100+) and destroying its dashboard ($1000+) to remove a stereo head unit that they'll flip for $50.

Correct, but for the same crime and effort, (so just as easy) the criminal could have made a bigger profit. They took the stereo and left behind the laptop. Criminals however are not always the brightest bulbs.

Someone broke into the office of a consulting shop I was working for, passing up dozens of macbook pros and who knows what else for an old-school translucent aqua imac and a $100 Walmart bike.

To be fair, if they were tech savvy they would probably work as freelancers or at a computer store instead of stealing aqua imacs.

They were probably hipsters... was it is a fixed gear bike? And Aqua iMacs are pretty culkin.

Notice any facial hair trimmers missing?

Please. No walmart "bike" has horizontal drop-outs.

Incorrect. http://www.walmart.com/ip/700c-Thruster-Fixie-Bike/21635147?...

Comment of the year. Hah!

The thief probably wasn't bright and hadn't seen it before, thinking that iMac must be so new that he hasn't seen it in the news and therefore the most valuable (after all, Apple is making colored iPhones now).

Nah, just wait 15 years and sell the Aqua iMacs for thousands of dollars. Better than those mainstream macbook pros...

Sounds about right, those macbooks aren't worth anything.

Many of these opportunistic thieves think about what they can move quickly so if they are caught they no longer have the goods on them. That imac and walmart bike they could have moved the same day for probably $100 profit, where as the macbooks they may have had to shop them around for longer, long enough for theft services to lock them down and track them once they are turned on... Not good news for the crook. They are smarter than you probably think.

Most scrypt mining software uses the CPU by default. It might have been too difficult for the thief to figure out how to get GPU mining setup.

No it doesn't. cgminer is the "default" that almost everyone uses and the current version doesn't even have CPU mining. The current version doesn't have script either, you gotta download a previous version but that's a different story. You gotta throw in a --script when starting it, otherwise it mines with SHA-256.

If you wanna CPU mine, you gotta download a specific CPU miner.

Source: I mine Litecoins.

You'd think somebody smart enough to glean a key from github and setup instances on aws would have thought this out more

Makes you wonder why the criminal didn't launch g2.2xlarge instances which would get 185 kH/s per instance. In fact for awhile there litecoin mining was profitable at spot prices.

http://www.completefusion.com/profitable-litecoin-mining-on-...

My guess would be ignorance. I don't think the criminal behind this knows what he is doing.

A smarter criminal would have opted for g2.2xlarge instances as well as mining for a currently more profitable coin. Granted he'd need to be careful not to leave a trail, he could essentially trade these coins for LTC and still obtain more litecoins.

An even smarter criminal would have "mined" the Ripple give away using EC2, there are still people paying for those instances as we speak so surely they would be more profitable than litecoin mining (assuming you sell them right away).

https://www.computingforgood.org/

https://ripple.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=4382

Uh, nope. I "mined" Ripple through that little project for a couple of days (using the g2 instances) and got a couple of dollars worth of Ripple back for over $100 ec2 bill (460 hours of WCG runtime).

I'll boinc on my desktop for science and goodwill but will not waste any more time on Ripple's program or indeed on Ripple itself, as brilliant as the idea is. Ripple's founders are hanging on to their 60%+ outstanding Ripples so tightly that I suspect the project will never truly get off the ground.

As much as people criticize it, I think some variation of Bitcoin's seignorage mining is the only realistic way to bootstrap a successful virtual currency, at least at this point.

Premined strategies like Ripple chose certainly aren't the road to success.

I used it to mine dogecoin using those same instructions. I either had to use an older nvidia driver version or an older version of CUDAminer, though. So it wasn't that simple to set up once CUDAminer got the update that broke the newer NVidia software. This happened near the first of the month. http://doges.org/index.php?topic=43.0

Pardon my ignorance but why are you dogecoin mining?

My guess: the difficulty is low enough that it's profitable to mine dogecoin and flip it for Bitcoin or Litecoin. I know a lot of altcoin miners do this, and there are some pools (middlecoin) that are geared towards this.

I'm even more amazed that there is demand for dogecoin then. I see the value of LTC and others but what is the USP of dogecoin?

It was created as a joke altcoin, but some people actually desire it. Most likely to flip it, or just to say they own some.

The doge brand is the USP. Most LTC clones are already largely undifferentiated, so this is actually a strong contender given it's technically almost identical to the rest.

That sounds about on par with copper theft, it's often ripped out of installed equipment like AC units or transformers that require total replacement.

Not only that, LTC has been one of the lesser profitable scrypt-coins to mine for a while.

See https://www.multipool.us/ for reference. Although it fluctuates a lot, LTC has been around 4th-5th in profitability among scrypt coins. Often 5th. And wait for Doge to feature in these pools :-)

Actually, it's worse than that. Check http://coinwarz.com and http://coinchoose.com. Multipool is limited to the coins they mine. If you check out the more general list at the sites I mentioned, LTC is not even in the top 25.

sigh I was afraid it was THAT stupid.

it almost always is, with the crypto-currency crew. unbridled greed is the driving force of the movement now

I was trying to launch a GPU instance the other day for (scrypt-based) dogecoin mining, but I couldn't find it in the list. Perhaps they are sold out?

You need to make sure you have selected a compatible (cluster something, and green perhaps) AMI first.

Then the GPU instances will be available in the list. Ran into the same thing myself ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com