Mining cryptocoins with supercomputers

by
in hardware on (#3EQ)
story imageIt apparently takes a lot of work to mine for crypto-currencies like BitCoin, or my personal favorite, DogeCoin. It's actually so much work now that using general purpose CPUs is completely fruitless, and even GPU-based mining is falling out of favor. However, what if you had access to a supercomputer? Perhaps you could just "borrow" somebody else's supercomputer for a while... they're already paying for it anyway, right? They probably won't even notice!

Or maybe they will...
Reply 4 comments

some details (Score: 2, Informative)

by wjwlsn@pipedot.org on 2014-02-23 15:11 (#52)

Looking at this submission now, I see that the style probably not a good fit for a site probably inhabited solely /. refugees. It provides no details, which requires people to RTFA. Not going to happen. So, here's what I would add:

An unnamed individual "borrowed" the 4,096 node, 32.4 TFlops Odyssey super at Harvard to mine DogeCoins for an undisclosed period of time. The outcome? The prospective DogeCoin miner has lost access to "any and all research computing facilities on a fully permanent basis." To top it off, the culprit probably didn't get away with any appreciable amount of coin.

Wow. So broke. Such rulebreak. Much punish.