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Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin

arstechnica.com

41–50 of 91 posts

Re: Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin

#41
post #32

I'm currently "ignoring" a similar effort in my lab (~20 workstations). I don't think they've broken a MHash/s yet out of an estimated potential ~2-3MH.

We recently received an email about our Comp Sci labs (300+ GPU-equipped workstations) being used for bitcoin mining at night.

I hope not to receive a similar one. I overheard them talking about using an external stratum proxy, maybe they'll also use ssl/ssh.

Re: Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin

#42
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a back of the envelope calculation. In theory (by supply-demand idea), you would make a negligible profit mining bitcoins. Each bitcoin is worth about $600. If our supply-demand assumption is true, the $2,160,000 dollars of Bitcoins that come into existence every day, that's also about $2,160,000 of electricity used. Or about 18,000,000 kWh per day. Or about 9,000,000 kg of C02 per day (9000 metric tonnes). Th…

> the $2,160,000 dollars of Bitcoins that come into existence every day, that's also about $2,160,000 of electricity used. You lost me. What?

The assertion is that there's roughly enough miners that miners make only a little profit. If your electricity costs $80 and you're likely to make $100, you're going to do it, and the OP is making an assumption that enough people have made that calculation that the amount of money made per miner is close to the cost of electricity per miner.

Therefore, the cost of electricity used should be close to the value of the bitcoins produced.

Re: Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin

#43

I'm hopeful that future cryptocurrencies won't be so energy-intensive to mine. Bitcoin is already a non-negligible contributor to global CO2 emissions, believe it or not. EDIT: Reversible computing ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing ) is a possible way to have computationally difficult proof-of-work while minimizing energy consumption.

Here you go: http://www.nxtcrypto.org/ 100% Proof of stake, 1 minute blocks, no mining.

And not a clone of Bitcoin and thus no reason to presume it's not full of bugs and security exploits. Bitcoin is king for a reason, it's survived the scrutiny; any alt coin that chooses to do a complete rewrite is in for a long hard road to come anywhere close to the trust Bitcoin has earned.

Re: Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin

#44
post #29

I'm hopeful that future cryptocurrencies won't be so energy-intensive to mine. Bitcoin is already a non-negligible contributor to global CO2 emissions, believe it or not. EDIT: Reversible computing ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing ) is a possible way to have computationally difficult proof-of-work while minimizing energy consumption.

From the README of my "Cuckoo Cycle" Proof-of-Work at https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo : Mining is generally considered to be inherently power hungry but it need not be. It’s a consequence of making the proof of work computationally intensive. If computation is minimized in favor of random access to gigabytes of memory (incurring long latencies), then mining will require large investments in RAM but relatively little…

I'd be on board. Now we have to build it, and more importantly, build a community around it.

Re: Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin

#45
post #15

I'm hopeful that future cryptocurrencies won't be so energy-intensive to mine. Bitcoin is already a non-negligible contributor to global CO2 emissions, believe it or not. EDIT: Reversible computing ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing ) is a possible way to have computationally difficult proof-of-work while minimizing energy consumption.

How do you make something incapable of being energy-intensive but still difficult? The more computers have to work at something, the more energy they use. I'm not the world's leading expert, but I don't see a way around that.

You get around it by slowing down the computation with memory latencies. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random-access_memory#Memory_wal...

Re: Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin

#46

I'm hopeful that future cryptocurrencies won't be so energy-intensive to mine. Bitcoin is already a non-negligible contributor to global CO2 emissions, believe it or not. EDIT: Reversible computing ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing ) is a possible way to have computationally difficult proof-of-work while minimizing energy consumption.

Here you go: http://www.nxtcrypto.org/ 100% Proof of stake, 1 minute blocks, no mining.

Isn't that a pyramid scheme? To have any nxt, you need to buy it from someone else.

Re: Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin

#47
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My understanding is the scrypt currencies use the lowest possible memory factor, which was just stupid.

Its memory requirement of 128KB is a compromise between computation-hardness for the prover and verification efficiency for the verifier. You don't want verification of a proof-of-work to take a lot of resources, since every client has to perform it.

Re: Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm imagining a future where every 'public' power outlet has a credit card reader attached.

You mean a bitcoin interface, surely :-)

That sounds like an infinite loop waiting to happen.

Re: Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin

#50

I'm hopeful that future cryptocurrencies won't be so energy-intensive to mine. Bitcoin is already a non-negligible contributor to global CO2 emissions, believe it or not. EDIT: Reversible computing ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing ) is a possible way to have computationally difficult proof-of-work while minimizing energy consumption.

Part of what makes the 'difficulty' difficult is the energy cost. If you lose that you lose some of the safety of the network.
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