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Mining Bitcoins on a college campus

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Re: Mining Bitcoins on a college campus

#3
"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.

Re: Mining Bitcoins on a college campus

#4
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.

Re: Mining Bitcoins on a college campus

#6
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.

Re: Mining Bitcoins on a college campus

#7
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).

Re: Mining Bitcoins on a college campus

#8
post #3

"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 bitc…

Correct. My computer pulls ~250 watts idling. It can easily go into 750 watts mining with a video card. I would imagine it can pull 320-375 watts at max cpu load.

Re: Mining Bitcoins on a college campus

#9
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.

Re: Mining Bitcoins on a college campus

#10
"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...

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