Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 91 posts

Re: Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin

#71

Post by pmorici »

heydenberk wrote: post #14

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.

Even though it is the dead of winter and we just had a major snow storm role though my furnace hasn't turned on in days. My mining equipment provides sufficient heat to keep my house warm on it's own.

Re: Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin

#72

Post by SkynetSystems »

Crito wrote: post #30
chc wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is being energy intensive, and then there is being CPU intensive. You could imagine a hypothetical coin that somehow uses proof of data storage and retrieval instead of proof of work. Producing and running tons of harddrives would still require power, but it would be a less.. direct.. requirement.

And hundreds of thousands or millions of destroyed hard drives would be better for the environment how?

Re: Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin

#73

Post by TeMPOraL »

Well, there you go.

This kind of use was sorta obvious since the dawn of Bitcoin (and even before; in my high school people were running SETI@HOME screen savers on all school computers to build up ranking points for their team). I'm not sure why so many people act surprised.

Re: Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin

#74

Post by plorg »

When xkcd's April Fools comic ran this year[1] I was doing some Real Work on a few of the engineering research servers at my university. When I noticed the jobs were going much slower than usual I popped open "top". Lo and behold, there were 20 instances of a program named 'xkcd', hashing violently, collectively using 90% of the CPU resources. I checked each of the other machines, and they too had been invaded by 'xkcd' daemons. Knowing that it would be over the next day, and that my job could wait, I figured I wouldn't try making trouble for the (presumably) undergraduate comic enthusiasts, but it sure was annoying. I found out later through reddit that there were at least three independent groups of students running the 'xkcd' hashing script on the servers. (A few had also spun up EC3 instances, so presumably they had a bit more skin in the game).

If nerds will do this for nothing but internet points, it doesn't surprise me that semi-public resources will be exploited when there's a monetary incentive involved.

[1]http://xkcd.com/1193

Re: Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin

#75

Post by SunboX »

heydenberk wrote: post #14

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.

Stop E-Mail-Spam. This would be a huge energy saver.

Re: Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin

#76

Post by maxerickson »

bbosh wrote: post #27
WizzleKake wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define non-negligible and show us some numbers. Mining is supposed to be difficult.

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 frantic addition of mining hardware (observable in the hash rate) contradicts this.

Re: Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin

#77

Post by userbinator »

While I think there are many interesting properties of cryptocurrency and the potential applications, I also can't help but think that this mining is just an extreme waste of computing power; compared to other uses like research, application development, hosting a website, even gaming (entertainment), mining (use for heating aside) looks like it's not much more than using computing power for the sake of using computing power, which I find extremely disturbing.

Re: Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin

#78

Post by userbinator »

mkeung wrote: post #9
cmelbye wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And things like a class of students sitting in a lecture theater with their laptops plugged in, are they mining or gaming or maybe just some hung process is in an infinite loop taking the CPU to 100%?

(I'll admit that I've used a "heater.exe" for warming my hands with a laptop on a cold day...)

Re: Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin

#79

Post by Retric »

hershel wrote: post #67
tromp wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There could be an ASIC for that. There's a new memory interface that works at 10 TB/sec with 16GB memory[1].Currently there's no cpu/gpu architecture in planning that's even close to needing that memory bandwidth, and the manufacturing is expensive. All this means this tech won't fit decentralization well. [1] http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=13209...

Bandwidth and latency are two seperate concepts, that 10TB bandwidth is probably around 100MB/second if you need truly random access to individual bytes of 16GB of ram and need to read each byte to find out which byte you need next. It's a speed of light issue where the round trip time back and forth to the individual RAM chips adds an inherent delay so RAM designers don't really focious on reducing latency as your stuck with a farly high latency anyway so bandwidth is generally more useful.

Re: Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin

#80

Post by ubercow13 »

pmorici wrote: post #71
heydenberk wrote: post #14

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.

Even though it is the dead of winter and we just had a major snow storm role though my furnace hasn't turned on in days. My mining equipment provides sufficient heat to keep my house warm on it's own.

Have you tried to calculate whether you make more money from mining than you would save by switching to a more cost effective way of heating your home, without electricity?
Post reply on HN