Mining Bitcoins on a college campus | Hacker News Reader

Mining Bitcoins on a college campus

whyalex.com

29 pointsmilewska58 comments

"Although I wouldn’t go so far to say that it is “stealing” (especially if they are like CU Boulder and leave all of their computers running 24/7 anyways)"

Now I am not entirely sure about this, but I am pretty certain that this is not how power usage on modern computers works.... An idling machine (what they will typically be doing) will be burning far less power than a computer pegging all of its cores running bitcoin miners.

Correct. My computer pulls ~250 watts idling. It can easily go into 750 watts mining with a video card. I would imagine it can pull 320-375 watts at max cpu load.

250W seems like really high idle consumption.

GFX cards don't idle nearly as well as CPU's; I would guess that is the reason. A 350W GFX card may idle around 150-200W.

And here in Norway, where it's cold most of the year so we have indoor heating, the power used from computers is saved from heating.

Not nearly as efficiently as your regular heater does though. So there is some cost.

>Not nearly as efficiently as your regular heater does though.

What do you mean? It's basically 100% efficient. Where else would the energy go? Through the ethernet port?

> It's 100% efficient.

Probably above 99.99% but not 100%. The light from the power LED might escape through the window and there's some electromagnetic emissions in the parts of the spectrum that might also go through walls, same goes for the sound of the fan.

The sound will be absorbed by the walls of the room, turning into heat.

Basically, the computer will be very nearly as efficient as a regular resistive electric space heater, but the building is almost certainly not being heated that way. Heat pumps are far more efficient than resistive heating.

http://physics.stackexchange.com/a/1494

(The building may also be on district steam heating, fuel oil, possibly even coal, any of which could be cheaper than electricity, depending on location.)

Depends on what is powering the heating system. In many countries, the price of electricity (per kWh) is much higher than natural gas. So generating heat via a CPU will work out more expensive than via a gas boiler.

Presumably he means efficiency in terms on monetary cost. Producing 1 BTU via electricity is about twice as expensive as producing 1 BTU via natural gas. In places like Norway, they're almost certainly using natural gas, so this is a real cost.

Actually gas is a bit uncommon here. We get cheap electricity from water running down the mountains.

I don't think it's a question of how much of the energy is converted to heat (which is clearly going to be near-100%), but rather what you're heating. If you're dumping energy into the room until you reach some temperature obviously it doesn't matter much what you're heating or how, but if your goal is merely to have the room feel comfortable to humans, heating up the whole volume to do so is not particularly efficient.

That said, I doubt that matters much for the average office space. A far more important factor - especially for those in cold climates - is that the "regular heater" is almost certainly not powered by the electric grid, but rather local combustion. I heat my home with gas, not electricity.

My guess is that heating-by-CPU is less cost effective than baseboard electrical heating which is already one of the least cost effective heating methods: http://www.efficiencymaine.com/at-home/home-energy-savings-p...

Also, depending on the setup of your HVAC system, it may be possible to cause a lab to overheat and trigger the cooling system in the middle of winter. Many datacenters vent excess heat year-round.

The absolute pittance of bitcoins you'll mine using CPUs won't begin to make up for these inefficiencies.

Edit: s/efficient/cost effective/g

Baseboard electrical heating is low on cost effectiveness, but it is very efficient :)

Fixed my wording.

I used to keep my home servers in a coat closet and whenever I went to put my coat on, it was already pleasantly warm.

Here in Germany, studying at most public universities is practically free and Phd students (in the natural sciences and engineering) are paid for their work, while research groups are generally underfunded.

It doesn't matter if you just add a little more to an already large electricity bill. You are stealing money from an organization that is set up to benefit the common good.

I'm so glad that I never had to "give the bitcoin talk" to somebody when I was still doing computer admin as part of my Phd contract.

Congrats, my rough calculations say you burned through at least $25 of energy to net $2. You are as bad as the people who shatter car windows to steal a stereo or those who rip copper wiring out of houses. It's a shame they don't withhold a degree from you. Reassess your life.

Yep.

An inefficient thief.

You are as bad as the people who shatter car windows to steal a stereo

Not even that; this is breaking car windows to steal $5 in change from the ashtray.

Cutting up an industrial air conditioner to get a few dollars worth of copper pipes.

Ah yes, bitcoin, the currency of the future that gives one big fat middle finger to the environment!

No, OP gave the middle finger to the environment, bitcoin is ambiguous.

Nobody really mines using CPUs anymore, they use ASICs which are multiple levels of magnitude more efficient.

I disagree. ASICs is far more efficient, for sure, but at best, it's slightly more profitable than the used electricity, because with every new mining technology introduction the difficulty is readjusted to compensate. So, even with current ASICs you might spend $8 worth of electricity and bandwidth to make $10 worth of virtual goods, goods which by them selves have no real world value outside their ability to facilitate trade. So you use $8 worth of real electricity to make the $10 worth of somewhat liquid currency.

Your values are dramatically off. I myself mine $0.50/day spending $0.04 in electricity, and I live in an extremely costly area for electric. I do not come anywhere near my bandwidth cap so thats a non discussion point.

Except that the decentralized bookkeeping that Bitcoin does is a lot more efficient than the bookkeeping done by financial institutions, and it is more difficult to falsify on top of that. So you could say that Bitcoin is more efficient in terms of energy cost vs bookkeeping accuracy.

"I still have a few tricks up my sleeve that CU doesn’t want to deal with any time soon!"

Probably want to be careful about that. No matter how smart/clever you are, you'll probably get caught doing whatever it is you're talking about. The school has already caught you doing something they didn't want you doing, so if it happens again, they might have a place to start looking...

Nah, the best response to the IT staff not revoking your access immediately is always to subtly threaten to ignore them and/or maliciously attack their systems.

Although I really appreciate all of the comments (OK except for the ones calling me an asshole and/or criminal), I think this one needs responding to.

I was definitely not referencing anything to do with computer systems, actually something much more internal (none of anyones business but CU has some shady dealings with sponsors who think they are giving money to support students but really supporting the universities whims. The way they get that money is by blackmailing students like myself with their campus jobs and making us write letters to these donors stating that their money is going to a good cause). Dumbly enough, they give us all a list of addresses for donors! So I was considering sending them all some actual email correspondence between myself and Uni admin showing where their money really goes... Talk about stealing... And it's definitely more than $3!

Sorry for the confusion, I took that part out because it wasn't explained well enough.

P.S. For all of you who think I should be expelled/that this is stupid: please refer to the "how to not be stupid" section... P.P.S. I might be an asshole, but I also might save 100 other universities electricity and computing power because I was kind enough to document my failure for future ambitious student hackers.

> Slightly jaded by the threat, but at least it was a threat and not a course of action… I still have a few tricks up my sleeve that CU doesn’t want to deal with any time soon!

Congratulations, you're an asshole. Their response was entirely appropriate.

> But my thought was: worst case-scenario I will have to give “back” the money made from the mining.

At my Uni there are rules for how the computers should be used. Installing this kind of software on a multitude of computers would be a breach of those rules. It would probably get you kicked out of the computer systems for some time, meaning you have no way to hand in your deliverables, use lab equipment etc. You would probably end up having to redo the semester.

Edit: I saw his edit to the post now. Looks like his Uni would treat it as a criminal offense.

> Future violations will be reported to campus police and treated as criminal trespass.

Reading articles like this makes me think of a distributed computing system we had at my college. Dunno if anyone's heard of condor, but basically, you'd submit an executable and some metadata to the central machine, and it would optimize and execute the job in parallel on all of the machines -- and every machine on the entire campus was hooked up to this system. That's a ton of computers, plus the school had its own massive data center. No need to hack anything, just log in and run a command.

It was supposed to be mostly for academic stuff, and one undergrad class where we learned about parallel programming. I wonder, though, how impressive it would be to run a bitcoin miner on something like that. Obviously unethical, and even if it wasn't, I've graduated and don't have access anymore. Still interesting to think about.

"How I misused university resources, potentially inconvenienced my fellow students, and wasted a ton of electricity"

> However, not quite sure about the “criminal trespass” threat. [...] I find that hard to believe as it is a public university.

It doesn't matter that they're public, if they've asked you to stop it's trespass. You don't even have to be on campus, if you accessed the network from home it could be trespass to chattels.

I did a similar thing earlier last year mining litecoin on a few dozen computers in my school's lab. What I did differently was I had a script running finger every few seconds which killed the miner if someone else was logged on to be nice to other users/avoid detection. I ended up making about $5 over a few days before stopping it out of guilt. In retrospect it was a really stupid thing to do; too much risk for too little gain.

I had the same thought back in 2012. The lab had just upgraded to the most expensive i7s available at the time. After reviewing my lab agreement, I quickly realized they could sue me for my organs.

A saner choice would have been to set one miner off, look at the results after 24 hours, and finally multiply that by 100. In retrospect, looking back at the benefit/risk analysis, you gained very little and risked too much!

Sometimes, especially in computing, sanity is asphyxiated by adrenaline. Just remember, you walked a dangerous line and to be more careful in your actions. The new acts/laws treating simple computational offenses as criminal charges are very extreme.

I had a similar situation happen at my alma mater; we had a set of interactive login farms available (one sit-down computer cluster designed for interactive desktop use, and one shell cluster designed for remote login). Periodically, users would run around using up all of the farm resources they could find to go mine cryptocurrencies, to the extent that they would starve people working on real class work. The all-time worst were the GPU miners, which caused substantial desktop latency, since they threaded poorly with whatever the compositing window manager du jour was.

Sigh. Glad this guy got nailed. This kind of thing can be pretty disruptive. I think most of us did stupid things in our time at college, but I'm surprised that this guy has the temerity to go try to brag about it on Hacker News with his real identity...

At GATech in the 90s/early 00s (can't speak to today) they used a unit of computational resource on the remote login systems called "bananas". You had a finite number of them. Staying logged in 24x7 throughout the semester but doing nothing else, you'd essentially use 0. Printing off something (they had, again can't speak to the present situation, a great printing service) might use up 0.01 bananas as a measure of the CPU time it took to submit the job. The effect was to mete out the limited computational resources. This wasn't 100% effective, but greatly discouraged abuse of the system (you had to go before the admins to ask for extra bananas).

The main way to bypass it: bananas weren't deducted until the job completed. If you had a long-running task, or a program caught in an infinite loop, you could leave it running indefinitely and take the hit at the end of the term or just postpone the hit until it was more convenient for you to go ask for forgiveness.

EDIT: And a note, this was not established on every computer system on campus. Just one of the more commonly used non-major systems.

I think this was a mistake. Like others have said it's a waste of their resources and you gain basically nothing in comparison. Even outside of electricity, having to bug the IT guy to look at the activity and taking up resources that other students could be using isn't worth the $2. I'd put an apology up and remove the veiled threat, it's just going to cause you problems.

How to commit a crime for no fun or profit!

mining BTC without an ASIC is just pointless, you should have tried litecoin (LTC), with 100 CPUs you would made a lot of profit, someone recently posted how he mined LTC in AWS and actually generated a profit (it's not possible anymore AFAIK).

Why on earth would you risk expulsion from college?

He does mention his 'distaste for higher education'. I assume he's just too spineless to drop out and is trying to get someone else to force it on him.

I've done this at my university, but in a slightly less obnoxious way.

We have a grid computing environment set up (using Sun Grid Engine) that allows people to run bulk jobs across both dedicated clusters and in spare cycles on lab machines. The way it was set up, CPU jobs on lab machines were set to an extremely low priority, so they don't interrupt legitimate use, and the jobs in some queues were set up so they'd be suspended when real jobs needed to run.

I'd submit hundreds of jobs to the background queue, which would run for a couple of hours and then stop. I also had access to a fairly large number of Nvidia GPUs which were used largely to teach people Cuda and run big simulations every month or so. I was able to use a pretty good portion of my college's compute power without being particularly annoying to other users.

I stopped after a while (maybe 2 weeks), because it was rather inefficient (I mined about 0.04 coins, at the time worth about $8) and because it was a huge pain to maintain. I would probably do it again with a different currency, but it's really not worth it.

Should have gone with primecoins... I would guess on a pool you could get about 10 a day with that much power (assuming they were i5/i7 machines) and then traded them in for bitcoin.

Although apparently the difficult of primecoin was raised a month or so ago. In any case going for another coin and trading is likely to be more profitable.

Interesting, I have access to a university cluster (in the top 100 of the top500) and I had played with the idea of using it in a similar way. I didn't actually implement it because I need to maintain good terms with the IT dept for my research (and everything else really). Does anyone know how this would scale or at what point (in terms of number of cores/memory) it would be a worthwhile?

No. Just don't. These computers are not your property. Do not use them for personal financial gain (unless it's somehow directly related to your studies).

You will cost your university far more in electricity than you'll make from Bitcoins. This is stealing.

I don't plan on it, haha. I was more curious. Besides if I got banned from the cluster I would have to drop out of my program.

What do you mean by worthwhile? For bitcoin, you won't manage to pay for the electricity using anything general purpose, so it won't be worthwhile at any scale.

I don't know the particulars, but CPU mining of scrypt coins is at least not very profitable.

I realized that worthwhile is a vague term when I wrote it. I would say that making $2.35 over 4 days is not worthwhile, but maybe $20/day (beer money) would be reasonable (considering I would not be paying for electricity). More to the point would be a rate (dollars/cpu/day) where you could calculate what the total take would be from running under different conditions. However, I realize that with the dynamic nature of bitcoins and the variety of hardware available that rate could vary quite a bit.

disclaimer This information is for educational purposes only, I want to keep my job.

I am also curious about these things. It looks like you can take in ~$0.30 a day mining litecoin on a 'decent modern cpu' (meaning a high end i5). Some Xeon monstrosity gets you up towards $1.

The best GPUs are more like $10 a day.

There might be somewhat better scrypt coins, but I guess more and more people are watching this (so they will have roughly even mining activity). Bitcoin will be far less (because a few thousand dollars of ASICs is good for thousands of GPUs or tens/hundreds of thousands of CPUs).

Ask permission to use the resources as part of a research paper. Be very explicit to what you are doing, how long you are doing it for, and donate the profits back to the school or charity.

A shithead does this on all the PCs of the campus of my private IT engineering school at Paris, but with Litecoins. He has roughly 200PCs working for him with a custom linux image that he set up via DHCP. So he has just to power on every single computer and they automatically boot on his image to suck power from the school (and to make next to nothing).

Using university resources for personal gains doesn't border on stealing. It is stealing. All the universities I had attended made me sign agreements which said so.

I am really curious to know how Bitcoin mining may work in India where you can simply throw a cable on the pole and steal electricity.

This is idiotic but his article about college gave me a better understanding of his motivation.

How so? Does he get any compensation should he get expelled from the college?

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