
Rogue employee fired for turning game into Bitcoin mining colony - pmorici
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-07/10/esea-bitcoin-mining-lawsuit
======
morsch
_In just a few weeks ESEA 's employee earned himself BTC30, or about $2,400
(£1,600) at today's exchange rates._

Ouch. Hardly worth it.

~~~
ceejayoz
It's always baffling to me that people will take these sorts of risks for such
small rewards. A few thousand dollars in exchange for firing, lawsuits,
possible criminal charges, and a ruined reputation in your field? No thanks.

~~~
rorrr2
It's recurring income that requires zero effort once it's running. $2400 every
few weeks is enough to live comfortably in many places in the world.

~~~
ceejayoz
> It's recurring income that requires zero effort once it's running.

It doesn't seem to be very recurring.

------
Ellipsis753
Wow. I wouldn't ever have even imagined that including a bitcoin miner in a
program would be illegal. Sure they never declared that they did so but loads
of programs do stuff that you'd never know about (for example reporting back
personal data about your computer or running complex anti-piracy related code
or modifying your system).

I'm a little surprised you can sue for "damaging client's systems and spiking
their electricity bills". Don't all video games do that? Hell, even javascript
on websites has been known to go into infinite loops and max out my computer
for a long time before I noticed. I'd never have thought I'd have a chance if
I sued the person who wrote the bad javascript.

Adding something secretly to your employers program without telling anyone
however is defiantly something you can be sued over. Wow, sucks to be him or
the employer really. I'm a little surprised he even tried, it's not really
something that would be easy to keep secret for any length of time.

~~~
awda
There's some intent here -- this is clearly intentionally abusive of users'
computers, and for his personal profit. Seems pretty clearly malicious.

~~~
pogden
This seems less malicious than, say, installing Ask toolbars.

------
thoughtpalette
Being a part of the ESEA community since 2007, the majority of the CS players
concerns are only that the person who implemented the code AkA Jaguar, was
also the person responsible for bans on the network. Their have not been any
bans for Cheating since the end of May (I believe).

------
hkmurakami
Hmm I wonder if users of "free apps" that currently show us advertisements
would accept bitcoin-mining by the app instead of ad-display as a revenue
stream.

I guess the issue would be that mining bitcoins takes a bunch of CPU resources
and would thus actually cost "money" for the user in the form of an
electricity bill

~~~
pdog
CPU and GPU mining are pretty much useless at this point. ASIC mining is where
it's at.

~~~
jlgreco
I thought that was true for individual mining, but aren't large pools still
filled with lots of CPUs tied together with BOINC or similar? I thought I read
something along those lines a few months ago (a long time ago, I know), but
I'm only vaguely recalling that.

~~~
TylerE
No, not really.

To give you an idea, a fast i7 mining on all cores is about 15 Mhash/sec. A
single ASIC miner can be 100,000-500,000Mhash. You would literally need
20,000+ CPU miners to equal a single asic miner.

~~~
celticninja
or 22 x i7 cpus just to match a USB ASIC doing 335Mhash/sec - they currently
retail at 1BTC so anywhere between £45 and £57 - whereas 22 x i7 will be
approx £5500 (at £250 a piece).

------
turboroot
Before CoinLab shifted gears and got sued by MtGox, what this guy got fired
for was exactly CoinLab's startup: monetizing games through Bitcoin mining.

Needless to say, with Bitcoin ASICs on their way back then, this wasn't
exactly a sustainable business model.

~~~
codesuela
to be nitpicky, Gox was sued by CoinLab for breach of contract (handing
CoinLab the US market for a comission)

~~~
turboroot
Oops, I didn't see what I had typed in. Thanks for correcting me. :)

------
jason_slack
Apparently they dont do any code reviews, QA, etc? I always find it
interesting when things like this "slip" through...

If they used SVN of GIT wouldn't other developers have noticed files changing
and reviewed the changes others are making?

~~~
jleehey
I thought the same thing. How much code would it take to set up this mining
operation? It seems unlikely that the amount of code added is trivial enough
to go undetected.

~~~
qwertzlcoatl
There is a conspiracy theory going around regarding this issue being
orchestrated collectively by the ESEA admins. This theory comes from several
really weird statements from ESEA admin ipkane, made months before the Bitcoin
mining was implemented.

------
brianbreslin
How did this code damage computers? Overheating? Kept fans running higher?

~~~
Hilyin
I don't think it'd damage the computers, if it did, it'd be very minor, like
you said. I'd say the biggest effect would be people's electrical bills being
higher.

~~~
speeder
Bitcoin mining on Laptop GPU is known to destroy whole machines (usually by
overheating several parts of the motherboard and ruining them... also ruining
the GPU itself too)

------
bjf
For clarification, it wasn't a game that did the mining, but the ESEA client.
What makes it worse is ESEA is already a paid service.

------
snappy173
am i the only one that read this as employee of rogue ales
([http://rogue.com/](http://rogue.com/))? i need a beer ...

------
mmanfrin

      It's possible to earn virtual currency by lending computer processing power to the peer-to-peer Bitcoin network
    

Bitcoin is apparently a P2P network.

~~~
jlgreco
From wikipedia: _" The concept was introduced in a 2008 paper by pseudonymous
developer Satoshi Nakamoto, who called it a peer-to-peer, electronic cash
system.[1][8][9]"_

