
Mining Bitcoins on a college campus - milewska
http://whyalex.com/2014/01/undermining-a-college-campus/
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Crito
_" 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.

~~~
maaaats
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.

~~~
schmichael
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...](http://www.efficiencymaine.com/at-home/home-energy-savings-
program/compare-heating-options/)

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

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

~~~
schmichael
Fixed my wording.

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sentenza
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.

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conjecTech
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.

~~~
x0054
Ah yes, bitcoin, the currency of the future that gives one big fat middle
finger to the environment!

~~~
GigabyteCoin
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.

~~~
x0054
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.

~~~
masmullin
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.

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JonFish85
"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...

~~~
fivre
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.

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ceejayoz
> 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.

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maaaats
> 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.

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mcdougle
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.

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

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paulgb
> 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.

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pajohnson
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.

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ambiate
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.

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jwise0
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...

~~~
Jtsummers
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.

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brandynwhite
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.

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poolpool
How to commit a crime for no fun or profit!

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pacofvf
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).

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ck2
Why on earth would you risk expulsion from college?

~~~
jacalata
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.

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vault_
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.

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boyter
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.

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waiquoo
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?

~~~
schmichael
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.

~~~
waiquoo
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.

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Artemis2
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).

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tn13
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.

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

~~~
tensaix2j
How so? Does he get any compensation should he get expelled from the college?

