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As soon as I started reading I knew this was going to involve stealing electricity. "took it to my friend’s student dormitory where the electricity was “free”.

As soon as I started reading I knew this was going to involve stealing electricity. "took it to my friend’s student dormitory where the electricity was “free”." I was not disappointed! Life hack: stealing can make you money!

vvvvvo 4y ago
top_sigrid 4y ago
This is just at the beginning of the story to be fair. Later on he is mining in his living place and also writes about the electrity cost needing to be covered by the mining revenue.
- lemonking 4y ago
  The universities also very quickly banned crypto mining in dormitories. People still did it secretly, but it was very easy to get caught. There would have been no way to have any sizeable operations in a dorm.
  - AmericanChopper 4y ago
    A friend and I managed to run a PS3 cluster mining bitcoins in one of the labs on campus for pretty much the entire 2009 academic year. But I think that was before mining rigs became much of a nuisance.
    - seper8 4y ago
      And you're proud of this treft why exactly?
      - snapcaster 4y ago
        You're on _hacker_ news dude
        Loughla 4y ago
        That's an interesting statement. Are there still people on here who define hacker as a bad thing, instead of someone who wants to take things apart to see how they work? Is tech still counter culture now that it pervades every place in society? Is it still okay to completely shirk the law now that many tech companies, for all intents and purposes, write the laws? These are interesting questions to me.
        q-big 4y ago
        > Is tech still counter culture now that it pervades every place in society? Tech is not counter culture (and has in my personal observation never really been). Hacker culture, on the other hand, was counterculture from beginning on and still mostly is.
        bleuarff 4y ago
        I'd say the stereotype may include a willingness to break the law in order to achieve some technical feat.
        lupire 4y ago
        Or a willingness to achieve some techical feat to break a law.
        brianwawok 4y ago
        Is it a technical feat to install code someone else wrote on a computer and click RUN?
        lupire 4y ago
        The distinction between legal and illegal hacking it relatively recent. Stealing small amounts of money or value goes way back. And Hacker News is run by YCombinator, which has an application form that asks applications to explain a time when they cheated ("hacked") a system for personal advantage.
      - AmericanChopper 4y ago
        Was just sharing my experience with the topic really. Tbh, building a PS3 supercomputer was one of the most educational experiences I had during my time at university. If they didn’t have an 11 figure endowment I might almost feel bad about it. Edit: Also, I absolutely didn’t get rich from this if that’s what you’re concerned about for some reason. We cashed out after an early price spike, pocketing several thousand dollars each, which with both considered to be a major windfall.
      - helloworld11 4y ago
        Considering the typical behavior of about 90% or more of all major tech companies that many people on this site work for or contract to, it's laughable that you'd snark at someone talking about a minor pseudo-theft of electricity form a dorm room several years ago. Hell, much of the shit being thrown by commentators on this site on cryptominers, who often use renewable energy sources for their mining, is itself laughable considering how much electricity and resources the mega tech corps they work for burn all the time. You could argue that said companies do so for "better" reasons, but that's debatable and a separate matter.
    - SamPatt 4y ago
      I'm extremely skeptical of this claim. Only a handful of people were mining Bitcoin in 2009, which is the same year it was created.
      - AmericanChopper 4y ago
        ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
      - lupire 4y ago
        Yeah, only computer tech geeks were using it then. The kind of people who would do wild stuff like go to college and install Linux on PlayStations.
        lottin 4y ago
        I don't know if Linux users had (have?) much sympathy for bitcoin.
        idiotsecant 4y ago
        I think Linux users are humans with a range of interests.
        squeaky-clean 4y ago
        I'd say 2009-2012 it was mostly Linux users, at least the communities I was in.
        greycol 4y ago
        I know a gui for bitcoin core was available for windows machines by at least the end of 2010 as that's what I used when I was first reading about it.
        lottin 4y ago
        The original bitcoin software ran on Windows if I'm not mistaken, so I don't know about "mostly Linux users". Maybe it was different in the US. In Europe I get the impression the FOSS community is predominantly left-leaning. My local Debian community certainly is, and they're anti-cryptocurrency (like myself). Slashdot was also quite skewed against bitcoin, and that was a pretty international geek readership.
josu 4y ago
That's not what the story is about. The operation was being ran at his place, what you quoted looks more like the initial test. >Meanwhile, my monthly electricity bill was hovering somewhere around a thousand euros"
zinodaur 4y ago
Its not stealing to use a resource paid for by a friend
- tmpz22 4y ago
  Thats sick their friend paid the electric bill for their whole university dormitory - nice person.
  - zinodaur 4y ago
    no but they paid for the electric bill for their room. The university should have made a policy about per-room usage The Man will fuck you on any technicality they can - don't turn around and give them the benefit of the doubt
    - lottin 4y ago
      There are unwritten rules in society. If you don't understand that you'll have a hard time getting anywhere in life.
      - RestlessMind 4y ago
        Those who end up amassing fortunes have often ruthlessly exploited the loopholes of unwritten rules - Peter Thiel taking advantage of Roth IRA, Uber and AirBnB dumping the externalities of unregulated taxis and hotels on the wider society, Walmart putting its lowest paid staff on medicaid etc. Just look at Panama papers to see how the rich exploit all the loopholes to save on taxes.
        turmeric_root 4y ago
        Are you implying that Peter Thiel should be seen as a role model?
        RestlessMind 4y ago
googlryas 4y ago
Do dormitories put acceptable use/abuse policies on the free electricity they give you? I know for a fact my university in the early 00's did not have an acceptable use/abuse policy on internet usage, and I was the person that caused them to create that policy! We had 2 T-3s for internet access, one dedicated to dorms, the other dedicated to labs/office spaces, but there was fast LAN access between the dorms and the labs. The dorm T3 was always slammed in the evening by about 5000 students, and the lab/office one was 100% available - so I set up squid proxy on a lab computer, and was getting 10 Mbps where everyone else was getting 50 kbps. A sysadmin saw the process running and tried to kill it and it forkbombed for some reason, crashing the lab computer. So they came and knocked on my door and made me sign a paper saying I wouldn't do it again, and then next year every incoming student had a to sign a policy saying they would behave on the network. I still maintained that I did nothing wrong, and it was the sysadmin that didn't know how to kill a process appropriately that needed to be talked to.
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
  > Do dormitories put acceptable use/abuse policies on the free electricity they give you? The dormitory did not give the free electricity to the author, but to their friend. If, for instance, an "all you can eat" buffet had an acceptable use policy, I do not think that it would allow "you can also feed a friend".
  - googlryas 4y ago
    So you believe it would be against policy for a non-resident visiting a resident to plug their phone in to charge?
    - nl 4y ago
      Of course it's against policy. It would also rightly be ignored. A visitor charging their phone? Ignore it. A resident running an extension cord to the carpark to charge the car of a different visitor every day? Enforce it. Don't ask bad-faith questions like this. There's nothing gained by arguing the extremes of a case.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> As soon as I started reading I knew this was going to involve stealing electricity. My favorite crypto miner story was from a guy who caught an employee hiding ASIC miners above the ceiling tiles in their office. For some reason he thought nobody would notice. They noticed both the noise and the weird new devices on the network. I suspect he lost more money from getting fired than he gained from the crypto mining. His miners were offline for quite a long time while they were seized as evidence in the ensuing investigation, too.

vvvvvo 4y ago

top_sigrid 4y ago

This is just at the beginning of the story to be fair. Later on he is mining in his living place and also writes about the electrity cost needing to be covered by the mining revenue.

lemonking 4y ago
The universities also very quickly banned crypto mining in dormitories. People still did it secretly, but it was very easy to get caught. There would have been no way to have any sizeable operations in a dorm.
- AmericanChopper 4y ago
  A friend and I managed to run a PS3 cluster mining bitcoins in one of the labs on campus for pretty much the entire 2009 academic year. But I think that was before mining rigs became much of a nuisance.
  - seper8 4y ago
    And you're proud of this treft why exactly?
    - snapcaster 4y ago
      You're on _hacker_ news dude
      - Loughla 4y ago
        That's an interesting statement. Are there still people on here who define hacker as a bad thing, instead of someone who wants to take things apart to see how they work? Is tech still counter culture now that it pervades every place in society? Is it still okay to completely shirk the law now that many tech companies, for all intents and purposes, write the laws? These are interesting questions to me.
        q-big 4y ago
        > Is tech still counter culture now that it pervades every place in society? Tech is not counter culture (and has in my personal observation never really been). Hacker culture, on the other hand, was counterculture from beginning on and still mostly is.
        bleuarff 4y ago
        I'd say the stereotype may include a willingness to break the law in order to achieve some technical feat.
        lupire 4y ago
        Or a willingness to achieve some techical feat to break a law.
        brianwawok 4y ago
        Is it a technical feat to install code someone else wrote on a computer and click RUN?
        lupire 4y ago
        The distinction between legal and illegal hacking it relatively recent. Stealing small amounts of money or value goes way back. And Hacker News is run by YCombinator, which has an application form that asks applications to explain a time when they cheated ("hacked") a system for personal advantage.
    - AmericanChopper 4y ago
      Was just sharing my experience with the topic really. Tbh, building a PS3 supercomputer was one of the most educational experiences I had during my time at university. If they didn’t have an 11 figure endowment I might almost feel bad about it. Edit: Also, I absolutely didn’t get rich from this if that’s what you’re concerned about for some reason. We cashed out after an early price spike, pocketing several thousand dollars each, which with both considered to be a major windfall.
    - helloworld11 4y ago
      Considering the typical behavior of about 90% or more of all major tech companies that many people on this site work for or contract to, it's laughable that you'd snark at someone talking about a minor pseudo-theft of electricity form a dorm room several years ago. Hell, much of the shit being thrown by commentators on this site on cryptominers, who often use renewable energy sources for their mining, is itself laughable considering how much electricity and resources the mega tech corps they work for burn all the time. You could argue that said companies do so for "better" reasons, but that's debatable and a separate matter.
  - SamPatt 4y ago
    I'm extremely skeptical of this claim. Only a handful of people were mining Bitcoin in 2009, which is the same year it was created.
    - AmericanChopper 4y ago
      ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    - lupire 4y ago
      Yeah, only computer tech geeks were using it then. The kind of people who would do wild stuff like go to college and install Linux on PlayStations.
      - lottin 4y ago
        I don't know if Linux users had (have?) much sympathy for bitcoin.
        idiotsecant 4y ago
        I think Linux users are humans with a range of interests.
        squeaky-clean 4y ago
        I'd say 2009-2012 it was mostly Linux users, at least the communities I was in.
        greycol 4y ago
        I know a gui for bitcoin core was available for windows machines by at least the end of 2010 as that's what I used when I was first reading about it.
        lottin 4y ago
        The original bitcoin software ran on Windows if I'm not mistaken, so I don't know about "mostly Linux users". Maybe it was different in the US. In Europe I get the impression the FOSS community is predominantly left-leaning. My local Debian community certainly is, and they're anti-cryptocurrency (like myself). Slashdot was also quite skewed against bitcoin, and that was a pretty international geek readership.

josu 4y ago

That's not what the story is about. The operation was being ran at his place, what you quoted looks more like the initial test. >Meanwhile, my monthly electricity bill was hovering somewhere around a thousand euros"

zinodaur 4y ago

Its not stealing to use a resource paid for by a friend

tmpz22 4y ago
Thats sick their friend paid the electric bill for their whole university dormitory - nice person.
- zinodaur 4y ago
  no but they paid for the electric bill for their room. The university should have made a policy about per-room usage The Man will fuck you on any technicality they can - don't turn around and give them the benefit of the doubt
  - lottin 4y ago
    There are unwritten rules in society. If you don't understand that you'll have a hard time getting anywhere in life.
    - RestlessMind 4y ago
      Those who end up amassing fortunes have often ruthlessly exploited the loopholes of unwritten rules - Peter Thiel taking advantage of Roth IRA, Uber and AirBnB dumping the externalities of unregulated taxis and hotels on the wider society, Walmart putting its lowest paid staff on medicaid etc. Just look at Panama papers to see how the rich exploit all the loopholes to save on taxes.
      - turmeric_root 4y ago
        Are you implying that Peter Thiel should be seen as a role model?
        RestlessMind 4y ago

googlryas 4y ago

Do dormitories put acceptable use/abuse policies on the free electricity they give you? I know for a fact my university in the early 00's did not have an acceptable use/abuse policy on internet usage, and I was the person that caused them to create that policy! We had 2 T-3s for internet access, one dedicated to dorms, the other dedicated to labs/office spaces, but there was fast LAN access between the dorms and the labs. The dorm T3 was always slammed in the evening by about 5000 students, and the lab/office one was 100% available - so I set up squid proxy on a lab computer, and was getting 10 Mbps where everyone else was getting 50 kbps. A sysadmin saw the process running and tried to kill it and it forkbombed for some reason, crashing the lab computer. So they came and knocked on my door and made me sign a paper saying I wouldn't do it again, and then next year every incoming student had a to sign a policy saying they would behave on the network. I still maintained that I did nothing wrong, and it was the sysadmin that didn't know how to kill a process appropriately that needed to be talked to.

SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
> Do dormitories put acceptable use/abuse policies on the free electricity they give you? The dormitory did not give the free electricity to the author, but to their friend. If, for instance, an "all you can eat" buffet had an acceptable use policy, I do not think that it would allow "you can also feed a friend".
- googlryas 4y ago
  So you believe it would be against policy for a non-resident visiting a resident to plug their phone in to charge?
  - nl 4y ago
    Of course it's against policy. It would also rightly be ignored. A visitor charging their phone? Ignore it. A resident running an extension cord to the carpark to charge the car of a different visitor every day? Enforce it. Don't ask bad-faith questions like this. There's nothing gained by arguing the extremes of a case.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

> As soon as I started reading I knew this was going to involve stealing electricity. My favorite crypto miner story was from a guy who caught an employee hiding ASIC miners above the ceiling tiles in their office. For some reason he thought nobody would notice. They noticed both the noise and the weird new devices on the network. I suspect he lost more money from getting fired than he gained from the crypto mining. His miners were offline for quite a long time while they were seized as evidence in the ensuing investigation, too.