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Crypto miners are killing free CI

layerci.com

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Re: Crypto miners are killing free CI

#11

Post by davidgerard »

Lyn_layerci wrote: post #5
salawat wrote: post #4

Once you have any way of allowing other people to use cycles... They will do it. And you can't really be surprised when you have these cryptocurrencies that folks in need of cash with few if any other options use it. It's why I object to the activity on principle. It becomes the new default+ activity. Any computation not explicitly provisioned in a way that guarantees pre-empting a cryptocurrency generating process n…

Yes, this needs to be solved at the crypto level - attackers always have the advantage.

This is usually Monero mining, which is still feasible on general CPUs - particularly if you're stealing the compute power.

Monero is quite hard to trade directly to actual money - you usually have to go via BTC or ETH.

So a systemic fix basically involves crashing the price of crypto in general, to take away the financial motivation.

(This is also one obvious solution to bitcoin's CO2 production - it's all about the US dollars, so hit those gateways.)

Re: Crypto miners are killing free CI

#12

Post by abayer »

Lyn_layerci wrote: post #2

Sharing some thoughts from our own experience fighting cryptominers and the negative externalities for CI companies and their users. I'd be curious to hear if any other services have been affected.

Yup, we’re dealing with it on CodeShip. I’m pretty sure all CI services are swamped by mining on free accounts or fraudulent paid accounts.

Re: Crypto miners are killing free CI

#13

Post by quickthrower2 »

Contrarian point of view: why do we “need” free CI? Open source can run CI locally on docker etc. The free CI is marketing for the CI companies. Don’t offer free compute. We need to train the industry in general to pay for trials. Some companies eg those in the SEO vertical manage to do this. Ahrefs for example.

Re: Crypto miners are killing free CI

#14

Post by lifeofguenter »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #13

Contrarian point of view: why do we “need” free CI? Open source can run CI locally on docker etc. The free CI is marketing for the CI companies. Don’t offer free compute. We need to train the industry in general to pay for trials. Some companies eg those in the SEO vertical manage to do this. Ahrefs for example.

Running something locally is not necessarily free either. Even if maybe the "host" is for free (which I can not imagine, unless someone throw something at you), it will still require your time to setup and ensure its running.

For private/small open source projects I would highly welcome such a pricing tier from travis-ci but 69USD is just not in my pocket (not saying its unjustified though!).

For larger open-source projects that rely on many builds throughout the day/month, this might be a bigger problem.

So while its "free" marketing, it might be much more crucial to our open-source structure than we think it is (which might be a problem as well).

And I think we can all agree: open source software is an important part not only for the industry but our lives :)

Re: Crypto miners are killing free CI

#15

Post by mellyjelly »

lifeofguenter wrote: post #14
quickthrower2 wrote: post #13

Contrarian point of view: why do we “need” free CI? Open source can run CI locally on docker etc. The free CI is marketing for the CI companies. Don’t offer free compute. We need to train the industry in general to pay for trials. Some companies eg those in the SEO vertical manage to do this. Ahrefs for example.

Running something locally is not necessarily free either. Even if maybe the "host" is for free (which I can not imagine, unless someone throw something at you), it will still require your time to setup and ensure its running. For private/small open source projects I would highly welcome such a pricing tier from travis-ci but 69USD is just not in my pocket (not saying its unjustified though!). For larger open-source p…

This is part of the reason open source is so important, but should be enough on its own to argue that free services should exist: these CI services have been an important piece of education, which should be free.

Re: Crypto miners are killing free CI

#16

Post by codekansas »

ddevault wrote: post #7

We're moving builds.sr.ht to only support paid users from May forward because of crypto mining abuse. Background here: https://man.sr.ht/ops/builds.sr.ht-migration.md I've been in touch with many other people working in the CI industry and this has become a massive problem for all of us over the past few months. Entire industry working groups have been set up for knowledge sharing to combat the crypto mining epidemic…

Crypto actively rewards anti productive behavior. I wonder how many smart, ambitious people will decide to exert their talents doing basically useless stuff simply because of the financial incentives

Re: Crypto miners are killing free CI

#17

Post by lacker »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #13

Contrarian point of view: why do we “need” free CI? Open source can run CI locally on docker etc. The free CI is marketing for the CI companies. Don’t offer free compute. We need to train the industry in general to pay for trials. Some companies eg those in the SEO vertical manage to do this. Ahrefs for example.

I mean we don't need it, society can survive without free CI, but it is nice. I'm happy to get free CI for an open source project in return for the CI company marketing to me a bit about how great their product is.

Re: Crypto miners are killing free CI

#18

Post by Ramiro »

Lyn_layerci wrote: post #2

Sharing some thoughts from our own experience fighting cryptominers and the negative externalities for CI companies and their users. I'd be curious to hear if any other services have been affected.

We have the same problem in Okteto. We've been investing a lot on building tech to prevent this (I gave a talk on this during the last eBPF community days -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tplv3Hjjv2Q), but it's tough. We spend a LOT of resources fighting it.

Re: Crypto miners are killing free CI

#19

Post by nix23 »

ddevault wrote: post #7

We're moving builds.sr.ht to only support paid users from May forward because of crypto mining abuse. Background here: https://man.sr.ht/ops/builds.sr.ht-migration.md I've been in touch with many other people working in the CI industry and this has become a massive problem for all of us over the past few months. Entire industry working groups have been set up for knowledge sharing to combat the crypto mining epidemic…

>In addition to entirely failing to meet its basic objectives as a useful currency.

That's the biggest problem, and it should be like IOTA where you "proof" when you do an transfer and just then, and not by "printing" coins, it's a massive waste of energy.

Re: Crypto miners are killing free CI

#20

Post by nix23 »

codekansas wrote: post #16
ddevault wrote: post #7

We're moving builds.sr.ht to only support paid users from May forward because of crypto mining abuse. Background here: https://man.sr.ht/ops/builds.sr.ht-migration.md I've been in touch with many other people working in the CI industry and this has become a massive problem for all of us over the past few months. Entire industry working groups have been set up for knowledge sharing to combat the crypto mining epidemic…

Crypto actively rewards anti productive behavior. I wonder how many smart, ambitious people will decide to exert their talents doing basically useless stuff simply because of the financial incentives

You could say the same about the whole Finance-industry..has nothing todo with Crypto.
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