Rogue employee fired for turning game into Bitcoin mining colony

[morsch]

In just a few weeks ESEA's employee earned himself BTC30, or about $2,400 (£1,600) at today's exchange rates.

Ouch. Hardly worth it.

[ceejayoz]

It's always baffling to me that people will take these sorts of risks for such small rewards. A few thousand dollars in exchange for firing, lawsuits, possible criminal charges, and a ruined reputation in your field? No thanks.

[gocard]

He must have put the decimal point in the wrong place or something.

[mathattack]

I witnessed a fraud where someone ended their career over a couple grand in expenses. I couldn't believe it. My takeaway was they thought they wouldn't be caught, or they could talk their way out of it if they were.

Unless this is a case of someone saying, "Wouldn't this be cool?" it's probably the tip of the iceberg. The bitcoins could be fueling a drug or gambling habit, or something else. The story is rarely as simple as one mistake - there's usually a history of poor judgment.

[Ellipsis753]

Wow. I wouldn't ever have even imagined that including a bitcoin miner in a program would be illegal. Sure they never declared that they did so but loads of programs do stuff that you'd never know about (for example reporting back personal data about your computer or running complex anti-piracy related code or modifying your system).

I'm a little surprised you can sue for "damaging client's systems and spiking their electricity bills". Don't all video games do that? Hell, even javascript on websites has been known to go into infinite loops and max out my computer for a long time before I noticed. I'd never have thought I'd have a chance if I sued the person who wrote the bad javascript.

Adding something secretly to your employers program without telling anyone however is defiantly something you can be sued over. Wow, sucks to be him or the employer really. I'm a little surprised he even tried, it's not really something that would be easy to keep secret for any length of time.

[awda]

There's some intent here -- this is clearly intentionally abusive of users' computers, and for his personal profit. Seems pretty clearly malicious.

[rfvtgb]

>Don't all video games do that?

The software actually provides access to competitive leagues and various other resources for various games.

I think this is a good summary of the backstory:

http://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/comments/1hn6n5/esea_north_ameri...

[invisible]

> I'm a little surprised you can sue for "damaging client's systems and spiking their electricity bills".

Running a GPU at 100% for days will destroy said GPU pretty quickly. Heat can only escape from things so fast without being given a cool down period. GPUs regularly run $400+ and there was malicious intent with regard to the damage (unlike most bugs on websites/etc.).

[thoughtpalette]

Being a part of the ESEA community since 2007, the majority of the CS players concerns are only that the person who implemented the code AkA Jaguar, was also the person responsible for bans on the network. Their have not been any bans for Cheating since the end of May (I believe).

[hkmurakami]

Hmm I wonder if users of "free apps" that currently show us advertisements would accept bitcoin-mining by the app instead of ad-display as a revenue stream.

I guess the issue would be that mining bitcoins takes a bunch of CPU resources and would thus actually cost "money" for the user in the form of an electricity bill

[citricsquid]

Doubtful this would work long term, as the difficulty rises it will become worth much less than advertising. People are already preparing to lose money on their investments in dedicated mining hardware, consumer hardware is not going to be able to generate more than a few pennies even with significant usage in a few months.

[pdog]

CPU and GPU mining are pretty much useless at this point. ASIC mining is where it's at.

[zeidrich]

Running a free app takes CPU resources and costs money in the form of electricity bills too.

It's something that I'm sure users would be willing to do if it were advertised and well implemented.

[Aldo_MX]

I think it's more profitable to install Google Chrome or the Ask Toolbar, even "reputable companies" have fallen to the dark side :/

[turboroot]

Before CoinLab shifted gears and got sued by MtGox, what this guy got fired for was exactly CoinLab's startup: monetizing games through Bitcoin mining.

Needless to say, with Bitcoin ASICs on their way back then, this wasn't exactly a sustainable business model.

[codesuela]

to be nitpicky, Gox was sued by CoinLab for breach of contract (handing CoinLab the US market for a comission)

[jason_slack]

Apparently they dont do any code reviews, QA, etc? I always find it interesting when things like this "slip" through...

If they used SVN of GIT wouldn't other developers have noticed files changing and reviewed the changes others are making?

[jenrzzz]

You might be assuming too much of them. ESEA's client is barely hacked together and, like most other anti-cheat software, uses some nasty methods to detect cheating. I wouldn't be surprised if their other development processes reflect on that.

[jleehey]

I thought the same thing. How much code would it take to set up this mining operation? It seems unlikely that the amount of code added is trivial enough to go undetected.

[magal]

I came to say exactly this. No code reviews, no source control. Pretty scary.

[brianbreslin]

How did this code damage computers? Overheating? Kept fans running higher?

[testbro]

I believe the concern was that it ran on GPUs (mining on CPUs hasn't been cost-effective for quite some time). Since GPUs are rarely run constantly and don't see loads like mining produces during typical use, their owners might have overclocked them under those assumptions. With those assumptions violated, I wouldn't be surprised to see cards fail prematurely.

[Hilyin]

I don't think it'd damage the computers, if it did, it'd be very minor, like you said. I'd say the biggest effect would be people's electrical bills being higher.

[banachtarski]

just thermodynamics really. the cpu cycles spent mining bitcoins are in fact costing the user something.

[ambiate]

While mining litecoins, a capacitor in my power supply blew up. I saw a huge jolt of blue, my monitor lost connection and finished up with some smoke.

[invisible]

GPUs overheating and getting damaged from said heat. Running a GPU at 100% for days is probably a good way to burn it up.

[bjf]

For clarification, it wasn't a game that did the mining, but the ESEA client. What makes it worse is ESEA is already a paid service.

[snappy173]

am i the only one that read this as employee of rogue ales (http://rogue.com/)? i need a beer ...

[mmanfrin]

  It's possible to earn virtual currency by lending computer processing power to the peer-to-peer Bitcoin network

Bitcoin is apparently a P2P network.

[jlgreco]

From wikipedia: "The concept was introduced in a 2008 paper by pseudonymous developer Satoshi Nakamoto, who called it a peer-to-peer, electronic cash system.[1][8][9]"

[icebraining]

Uhm, yes? I'm not sure what's your point. It's a currency based on a P2P network.

[pdog]

P2P network actually isn't a bad description.