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Mining Bitcoins on a college campus

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Re: Mining Bitcoins on a college campus

#41

Post by tych0 »

wyager wrote: post #24
rhino369 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not nearly as efficiently as your regular heater does though. So there is some cost.

>Not nearly as efficiently as your regular heater does though. What do you mean? It's basically 100% efficient. Where else would the energy go? Through the ethernet port?

Presumably he means efficiency in terms on monetary cost. Producing 1 BTU via electricity is about twice as expensive as producing 1 BTU via natural gas. In places like Norway, they're almost certainly using natural gas, so this is a real cost.

Re: Mining Bitcoins on a college campus

#42

Post by MartinCron »

maaaats wrote: post #12
Crito wrote: 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…

And here in Norway, where it's cold most of the year so we have indoor heating, the power used from computers is saved from heating.

I used to keep my home servers in a coat closet and whenever I went to put my coat on, it was already pleasantly warm.

Re: Mining Bitcoins on a college campus

#43

Post by dannypgh »

wyager wrote: post #24
rhino369 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not nearly as efficiently as your regular heater does though. So there is some cost.

>Not nearly as efficiently as your regular heater does though. What do you mean? It's basically 100% efficient. Where else would the energy go? Through the ethernet port?

I don't think it's a question of how much of the energy is converted to heat (which is clearly going to be near-100%), but rather what you're heating. If you're dumping energy into the room until you reach some temperature obviously it doesn't matter much what you're heating or how, but if your goal is merely to have the room feel comfortable to humans, heating up the whole volume to do so is not particularly efficient.

That said, I doubt that matters much for the average office space. A far more important factor - especially for those in cold climates - is that the "regular heater" is almost certainly not powered by the electric grid, but rather local combustion. I heat my home with gas, not electricity.

Re: Mining Bitcoins on a college campus

#44

Post by x0054 »

GigabyteCoin wrote: post #37
x0054 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, bitcoin, the currency of the future that gives one big fat middle finger to the environment!

No, OP gave the middle finger to the environment, bitcoin is ambiguous. Nobody really mines using CPUs anymore, they use ASICs which are multiple levels of magnitude more efficient.

I disagree. ASICs is far more efficient, for sure, but at best, it's slightly more profitable than the used electricity, because with every new mining technology introduction the difficulty is readjusted to compensate. So, even with current ASICs you might spend $8 worth of electricity and bandwidth to make $10 worth of virtual goods, goods which by them selves have no real world value outside their ability to facilitate trade. So you use $8 worth of real electricity to make the $10 worth of somewhat liquid currency.

Re: Mining Bitcoins on a college campus

#45

Post by vault_ »

I've done this at my university, but in a slightly less obnoxious way.

We have a grid computing environment set up (using Sun Grid Engine) that allows people to run bulk jobs across both dedicated clusters and in spare cycles on lab machines. The way it was set up, CPU jobs on lab machines were set to an extremely low priority, so they don't interrupt legitimate use, and the jobs in some queues were set up so they'd be suspended when real jobs needed to run.

I'd submit hundreds of jobs to the background queue, which would run for a couple of hours and then stop. I also had access to a fairly large number of Nvidia GPUs which were used largely to teach people Cuda and run big simulations every month or so. I was able to use a pretty good portion of my college's compute power without being particularly annoying to other users.

I stopped after a while (maybe 2 weeks), because it was rather inefficient (I mined about 0.04 coins, at the time worth about $8) and because it was a huge pain to maintain. I would probably do it again with a different currency, but it's really not worth it.

Re: Mining Bitcoins on a college campus

#47

Post by Crito »

sliverstorm wrote: post #17
conjecTech wrote: post #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.

You are as bad as the people who shatter car windows to steal a stereo Not even that; this is breaking car windows to steal $5 in change from the ashtray.

Cutting up an industrial air conditioner to get a few dollars worth of copper pipes.

Re: Mining Bitcoins on a college campus

#48

Post by maxerickson »

waiquoo wrote: post #32
maxerickson wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by worthwhile? For bitcoin, you won't manage to pay for the electricity using anything general purpose, so it won't be worthwhile at any scale. I don't know the particulars, but CPU mining of scrypt coins is at least not very profitable.

I realized that worthwhile is a vague term when I wrote it. I would say that making $2.35 over 4 days is not worthwhile, but maybe $20/day (beer money) would be reasonable (considering I would not be paying for electricity). More to the point would be a rate (dollars/cpu/day) where you could calculate what the total take would be from running under different conditions. However, I realize that with the dynamic nature…

I am also curious about these things. It looks like you can take in ~$0.30 a day mining litecoin on a 'decent modern cpu' (meaning a high end i5). Some Xeon monstrosity gets you up towards $1.

The best GPUs are more like $10 a day.

There might be somewhat better scrypt coins, but I guess more and more people are watching this (so they will have roughly even mining activity). Bitcoin will be far less (because a few thousand dollars of ASICs is good for thousands of GPUs or tens/hundreds of thousands of CPUs).

Re: Mining Bitcoins on a college campus

#49

Post by masmullin »

waiquoo wrote: post #14

Interesting, I have access to a university cluster (in the top 100 of the top500) and I had played with the idea of using it in a similar way. I didn't actually implement it because I need to maintain good terms with the IT dept for my research (and everything else really). Does anyone know how this would scale or at what point (in terms of number of cores/memory) it would be a worthwhile?

Ask permission to use the resources as part of a research paper. Be very explicit to what you are doing, how long you are doing it for, and donate the profits back to the school or charity.

Re: Mining Bitcoins on a college campus

#50

Post by sliverstorm »

schmichael wrote: post #25
maaaats wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And here in Norway, where it's cold most of the year so we have indoor heating, the power used from computers is saved from heating.

My guess is that heating-by-CPU is less cost effective than baseboard electrical heating which is already one of the least cost effective heating methods: http://www.efficiencymaine.com/at-home/home-energy-savings-p... Also, depending on the setup of your HVAC system, it may be possible to cause a lab to overheat and trigger the cooling system in the middle of winter. Many datacenters vent excess heat year-round. The…

Baseboard electrical heating is low on cost effectiveness, but it is very efficient :)
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