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Employee Turns Gaming Network Into Private Bitcoin Mine
- nacho2sweet 13y agoIf only this option was available more in the gator browser bar heyday.
- niggler 13y agoyesterday's discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5636233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5636233 EDIT: wow has wired always been this bad? 16 trackers/ads according to ghostery, 20 according to disconnect
- salman89 13y agoIs this a viable revenue stream for free app developers? Would it ever make it past the Apple review process?
- Devilboy 13y agoBitcoin miners running on iPhones / iPads won't make any money, you need a decent GPU these days.
- salman89 13y agoSure, but could the work not be distributed amongst many users? How many concurrent users would it take for it to be useful? Would likely demolish battery life and data caps, but I think you could run only when batt > 50% and wifi is on.
- Tuna-Fish 13y agoIt would have minimal effect on data usage, as you only ever need to report back when you've found something, and you only need send a 32-byte precomputed seed every ~10 minutes or so. It would, however, absolutely demolish the battery. This kind of computation is pretty much directly proportional to power use, and modern smartphones are power-limited. So, if you mine at full tilt, the smartphone will drain the battery literally as fast as it can, and get really hot doing so. You can limit the hashing speed, but this will only spread the work over time. It won't change the fact that to get any good hashrate out of the system, you basically have to consume all the battery. However, all of this is pointless because you'd need millions, possibly tens of millions of concurrent users to match a single modern $1000 mining rig. Computing sha hashes is a workload that fits special-purpose hardware really well. GP hardware simply cannot properly compete anyway. And now as ASICs are driving up the difficulty, you'd be making much less than 1$ of profit for 1$ of electricity consumed.
- mathgorges 13y agoAccording to bitcoin.it [1] iPhone 3g's cpu (ARM1176JZ(F)-S) can achieve 1.19 kH/s When I plug that into Alloscomp's bitcoin calculator [2] it says that at todays exchange rate you could expect a return of about $0.02 per month per phone (assuming they're on 24/7) [1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison#ARM https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison#ARM [2] http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator
- UberMouse 13y agoIf you had one billion devices you would make around 30 million per month. One billion devices is totally unfeasible though (Especially one billion on 24/7) and you could definitely make more money some other way with that many devices.
- thereallurch 13y agoLike pushing ads to the phones.
- anywhichway 13y agoCould you imagine the reviews about draining battery life?
- salman89 13y agoAbsolutely. I'd be really interesting in seeing if the energy cost is lower than the average long term output. I'd be perfectly fine with leaving my iPhone plugged in all night if it meant it could generate me $x/night, where $x is greater than the electricity hit I get.
- Derander 13y agoI'd be surprised if it were worth it. Even with fairly efficient GPU mining rigs it's getting close.
- anywhichway 13y agoCould you imagine the reviews about draining battery life?
- anywhichway 13y agoCould you imagine the reviews about draining battery life?
- anywhichway 13y agoCould you imagine the reviews about draining battery life?
- supercoder 13y agoSomething we'd actually (half jokingly) thought about a few weeks back. Pretty sure you'd need a huge number of users to make it worthwhile, though would be interesting for someone to do the numbers. It could definitely get past the Apple review process, afaik it doesn't violate any developer guidelines (even though it feels wrong).
- lifeformed 13y agoNot for long. Once the 50gHash ASIC monsters come online, using anything else to mine will be unprofitable.
- yoster 13y agoInstead of donating to charity, they should have given it to the gamers who had their computers illegally used. They do not realize the criminal and civil actions that can arise from this.
- fragsworth 13y agoIt made $3700 and 14,000 users were affected. I doubt any of the users would care about the ~25-30 cents they might get from this...
- yoster 13y ago$3700 with the matching donation would make it 50-60 cents with your estimate. With a group lawsuit, the payout would be much greater.
- oijaf888 13y agoThe payout to the users would be greater or the payout from the company to the lawyers would be greater? The latter I agree, the former, I doubt given the paltry amounts that most class actions suits return.
- bestdayever 13y agoEspecially considering some people have said their GPUs burned out during that time (even though lpkane said it didn't optimize to use the GPU). His response when somebody asked him what they should do about the RMA "lol, I wouldn't tell them you were mining". He did offer everyone a free month of premium (a $7 value)
- hartror 13y agoThey're providing a premium account the the affected users.
- mseebach 13y agoAre you sure there are grounds for a criminal case? When you install and run a piece of software on your computer, you grant it a fairly wide license to run. Very little actual harm was done (I can't think of anything beyond power consumption and perhaps an infinitesimal amount of wear and tear), and certainly much less than a bug that causes the computer to crash. If crashing the user's computer could be grounds for a criminal case if would have very far-reaching consequences.
- wilfra 13y agoI smell bullshit. Sounds like the company tried it, got caught, and blamed it on a (fictitious?) rogue employee.
- d23 13y ago> In just a couple of weeks, he netted close to BTC30, or about $3,700. You honestly think the company would risk something like that for such a small amount of money?
- wilfra 13y agoI think they acknowledged they were willing to risk it by considering it in the first place.
- modarts 13y agoThat's what I found to be strange too. Why was it ever considered?
- Daniel_Newby 13y agoCustomers with a low cost of electricity and a hot GPU could have used it to offset the cost of their subscription. They would not have needed to learn anything about Bitcoin or manage their own financial account.
- bigiain 13y agoHmmm, I wonder if you could somehow plot bitcoin mining rates against location and temperature/climate? I wonder if there are people who selectively turn on their mining boxen to use as room heaters, effectively getting the computation (and bitcoins) "for free" since they'd be consuming the power for heating anyway?
- skarmklart 13y ago
- tlrobinson 13y agoJust wait until WebCL is widely deployed and any webpage could use your GPU to mine bitcoins!
- lucb1e 13y agoI suppose it's better than ads-only. When there are less ads, an ad will become more valuable and fewer need to be shown. Perhaps it'll one day be possible to run without Adblock Plus and not have three flashing 300x300 blocks on your screen at any given time. Also mining keeps a cryptocurrency's network secure. It sounds really good to me ^^
- kolinko 13y agoWell, it's not so good if you're trying to use laptop on battery power. Having said that - I wouldn't mind websites charging me automatically fractions of cents for reading their contents
- lucb1e 13y agoInteresting idea, "charging fractions of cents". Usually when people talk about covering the costs, ideas like monthly subscriptions and donations are mentioned, but I haven't heard about very small automatic fees. Then again, not all content is worth reading. It should be proportional to how long you are on the site, or you should be able to revoke it manually or something. Anyhow, an interesting idea to think about and toy with.
- pygy_ 13y agoAnd then WebCL will become disabled by default in sane browsers. Stealth mining is akin to theft (electricity bill), I wonder how it will be classified, legally.
- belorn 13y agoHow exactly is this different from sending unwanted java-script with ads and tracking code? The CPU cycle and bandwidth is not exactly free, and both cost electricity. Not that it matter. Current legal thinking regard consensus is a very simple one. So long the user stay on the site, then an implied consent is given to what ever the EULA says (so long the EULA page is linked in tiny text in the corner somewhere). What the cookie law in EU showed, is that there aren't enough political power at the layers below elected politician level that will enforce a strict consensus requirement on the web.
- mctx 13y agoCould this be a source of income for indie game developers? While users play the (free/cheap/torrented) game, the users graphics card spends its spare cycles on mining for the game developers. No obnoxious ads, no paying $60 for a game you only play a few times.
- cjh_ 13y agoThis works oddly well in that the amount you 'pay' for the game is directly proportional to how long you play it.
- lifeformed 13y agoOnce ASICs become mainstream, GPU mining will no longer be profitable.
- ninjin 13y agoIt depends on who is paying for the power though, as far as I know there are still botnets doing CPU/GPU mining on a large scale.
- SkyMarshal 13y agoGPU miners may migrate to Litecoin then for that reason. Going to be an interesting next few years in the cryptocurrency space.
- mike-cardwell 13y agoGPU miners have much less of an advantage over CPU miners when mining litecoin; It was designed to be memory intensive as well as cpu intensive (scrypt).
- SkyMarshal 13y agoRight, but whether a CPU miner is better for LTC or not is only relevant when you're choosing what kind of miner to buy. For those who already have GPU miners they bought for BTC, that are now becoming obsolete to FPGA and ASIC miners, the pertinent comparison is how to get the best ROI on their GPU miner - continue with BTC, switch to LTC, or just shut it off.
- ohwp 13y agoWould it be viable to rent a (GPU) cluster for mining? $3700 in 14 days seems doable...
- jacobquick 13y agoThis is ridiculous, it wasn't an employee it was the CEO, who dropped hints they were doing it all through April. Shouldn't expect better from Wired I guess. This being a entrepreneur tech site, it looks like there's a market for non-terrible companies providing video game-related software and services to niche multiplayer communities.