Why would one need to buy an advanced, expensive cryptocurrency mining rig, when there are plenty of PCs in the University waiting to be used. That philosophy and high hopes for the peak in Dogecoin price lead “Felix” into his University’s computer suite every evening.
Nevertheless, jokes aside the student who didn’t want give up on mining after it became known that it was late for him to become Bitcoin millionaire he turned his attention towards Doge.
However, unlike the member of the Harvard community, who dug for Doge on cluster reserved for time consuming calculations, Felix (not his real name) haven’t been caught yet. The mentioned researcher was cut from ever using the Harvard research computing facilities. At least they didn’t coerced him to pay the for the electricity.
Felix has been only expanding the scale of operation since his return to Imperial College London after last Christmas.
Hiding in Plain Sight
As my teacher once said – students are not humans. While we’ll leave the truth of this statement to his responsibility, one cannot disregard the finesse and luck this “faculty project” is being handled with.
The setup of this massive (only by the number of machines involved) mining pool is easy enough. What Felix did is subsequent installation of the right script on PCs turning their computational power towards single online account.
The student was able to fool the Symantec software protecting the desktops but he was not able to tap into the GPU power, which would greatly enhance the mining speed. Therefore, only the CPUs are open to him. Despite CPU mining being incomparably slower than the graphic card mining, the i7-2770k processors and their number do add up.
The Consequence
If Felix was to be caught there is no telling what the university might do.
On one hand he used the PCs at night, when these were not occupied and, well, these computers are used on the daily basis for surfing the Net and working on their papers. On the other hand, I bet the electricity consumption is significantly higher than it was before the mining process.
However, unless the price for Dogecoin spikes I do not think that money Felix gained from mining would be enough to cover any charge that could be applicable in this situation. 30,000 Dogecoins that Felix claims to have acquired amount to something like $30.
Actually, it would be much more effective if the researchers used their supercomputers to mine for digital coins themselves in the spare time. Imagine the tabloids – “Research Founded by Bitcoin Mining Alone!” That would be something!