Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin
arstechnica.com
Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin
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Re: Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin
#2I have heard people say that scrypt is better than SHA256 as a basis for cryptocurrency because it doesn't put all the network power in specialist ASIC boxes, but then stuff like this happens.
Do you think Harvard would have paid for a custom-build scrypt-coin miner if someone wrote a real academic proposal for it?
Re: Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin
#3If cryptocurrencies become mainstream, this will be a bigger problem I think. Even things like "free" electricity are attractive for mining purposes, ex: universities, businesses, etc. If every student setup mining, it adds up (at the university / business' expense).
If I am the one paying for an office at $500 a month that includes all electricity usage, is it fair to plug in a ton of mining hardware and profit / subsidize myself? What if I manage to use more than $500 worth of electricity?
Is shared space even setup for monitoring individual renter's usage behavior? I don't think so.
edit: note, I do mine Doge but with my own stuff at home
Re: Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin
#4I have heard people say that scrypt is better than SHA256 as a basis for cryptocurrency because it doesn't put all the network power in specialist ASIC boxes, but then stuff like this happens. Do you think Harvard would have paid for a custom-build scrypt-coin miner if someone wrote a real academic proposal for it?
I don't see why not, custom-built just means grabbing consumer grade gpus, with the "best" one currently the R9 270, which is ~$200 usd each. I don't think you need a huge budget so for academic reasons, why not. Plus, there are many scrypt coins out there (or they could even create harvardcoin) they could use for research purposes.
Don't need to necessarily use the mainstream profitable ones
Re: Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin
#5I have heard people say that scrypt is better than SHA256 as a basis for cryptocurrency because it doesn't put all the network power in specialist ASIC boxes, but then stuff like this happens. Do you think Harvard would have paid for a custom-build scrypt-coin miner if someone wrote a real academic proposal for it?
There have been some claims that an scrypt ASIC is coming soon, but I think it's mostly vapor so far.
Re: Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin
#6I have heard people say that scrypt is better than SHA256 as a basis for cryptocurrency because it doesn't put all the network power in specialist ASIC boxes, but then stuff like this happens. Do you think Harvard would have paid for a custom-build scrypt-coin miner if someone wrote a real academic proposal for it?
There have been some claims that an scrypt ASIC is coming soon, but I think it's mostly vapor so far.
From my understanding, scrypt ASICs have been held back by the cost of memory hardware as scrypt requires more memory usage. There has been talk of forking existing scrypt currencies to require even more memory to counter ASICs further but so far I think only a few new coins have done this.
Re: Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin
#7If cryptocurrencies become mainstream, this will be a bigger problem I think. Even things like "free" electricity are attractive for mining purposes, ex: universities, businesses, etc. If every student setup mining, it adds up (at the university / business' expense). If I am the one paying for an office at $500 a month that includes all electricity usage, is it fair to plug in a ton of mining hardware and profit / su…
That's a dead simple problem to fix. Just don't allow for unlimited free access to resources used for crypto currency mining.
Re: Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin
#8If cryptocurrencies become mainstream, this will be a bigger problem I think. Even things like "free" electricity are attractive for mining purposes, ex: universities, businesses, etc. If every student setup mining, it adds up (at the university / business' expense). If I am the one paying for an office at $500 a month that includes all electricity usage, is it fair to plug in a ton of mining hardware and profit / su…
I've actually caught wind of schemes in-flight exactly like you describe, using mining to transfer money from the business to the owner, essentially off the books.
Re: Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin
#9If cryptocurrencies become mainstream, this will be a bigger problem I think. Even things like "free" electricity are attractive for mining purposes, ex: universities, businesses, etc. If every student setup mining, it adds up (at the university / business' expense). If I am the one paying for an office at $500 a month that includes all electricity usage, is it fair to plug in a ton of mining hardware and profit / su…
That's a dead simple problem to fix. Just don't allow for unlimited free access to resources used for crypto currency mining.
but in a large building / campus, they can't possibly monitor electricity usage per individual or company occupying the space without upgrading the infrastructure significantly.
Re: Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin
#10If cryptocurrencies become mainstream, this will be a bigger problem I think. Even things like "free" electricity are attractive for mining purposes, ex: universities, businesses, etc. If every student setup mining, it adds up (at the university / business' expense). If I am the one paying for an office at $500 a month that includes all electricity usage, is it fair to plug in a ton of mining hardware and profit / su…
There is a new extremely "green" office building in Seattle that does meter/monitor individual electricity plugs. It's uncommon, but not entirely unprecedented.