Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin

[heydenberk]

I'm hopeful that future cryptocurrencies won't be so energy-intensive to mine. Bitcoin is already a non-negligible contributor to global CO2 emissions, believe it or not.

EDIT: Reversible computing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing) is a possible way to have computationally difficult proof-of-work while minimizing energy consumption.

[tromp]

From the README of my "Cuckoo Cycle" Proof-of-Work at https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo :

Mining is generally considered to be inherently power hungry but it need not be. It’s a consequence of making the proof of work computationally intensive. If computation is minimized in favor of random access to gigabytes of memory (incurring long latencies), then mining will require large investments in RAM but relatively little power.

Cuckoo Cycle represents a breakthrough in three important ways:

1) it performs only one very cheap siphash computation for about 3.3 random accesses to memory,

2) its memory requirement can be set arbitrarily and doesn't allow for any time-memory trade-off.

3) verification of the proof of work is instant, requiring 1 sha256 and 42 siphash computations.

Runtime in Cuckoo Cycle is completely dominated by memory latency. It promotes the use of commodity general-purpose hardware over custom designed single-purpose hardware.

Other features:

4) proofs take the form of a length 42 cycle in the Cuckoo graph.

5) it has a natural notion of (base) difficulty, namely the number of edges in the graph; above about 60% of size, a 42-cycle is almost guaranteed, but below 50% the probability starts to fall sharply.

6) running time for the current implementation on high end x86 is under 24s/GB single-threaded, and under 3s/GB for 12 threads.

7) making cuckoo use a significant fraction of the typical memory of a botnet computer will send it into swap-hell, and likely alert its owner.

[chc]

How do you make something incapable of being energy-intensive but still difficult? The more computers have to work at something, the more energy they use. I'm not the world's leading expert, but I don't see a way around that.

[hnolable]

Ripple's consensus algorithm pretty much has this licked.

https://ripple.com/wiki/Consensus - http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/10180/what-are-th... - http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/13330/what-is-the...

[fnordfnordfnord]

I wonder if the energy spent moving/securing bitcoin is more or less than the energy we spend moving/securing cash/credit. Driving armored trucks full of cash and coins around isn't free. Nor is it free to keep the regular banking system's electronic infrastructure running.

[pmorici]

Even though it is the dead of winter and we just had a major snow storm role though my furnace hasn't turned on in days. My mining equipment provides sufficient heat to keep my house warm on it's own.

[WizzleKake]

Define non-negligible and show us some numbers.

Mining is supposed to be difficult.

[raverbashing]

Here's the thing

You replace a "dumb heat generator" with a dogcoin miner.

That is: turn down the heating in your place and let the computer heat it up a bit.

[maaku]

Energy consumption is precisely what gives proof of work its utility. It provides the economic cost to overturning ledger commitments which is at the core of bitcoin's security guarantees.

[josh-wrale]

I would like to see folded coins.. That is, protein folding. I'm definitely not qualified to suggest this, but it seems like proteins are kind of like hash values in their one way process structure.. I wonder if protein foldings are finite in number like bitcoins?

[infruset]

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1xgd8v/those_words_...

[SunboX]

Stop E-Mail-Spam. This would be a huge energy saver.

[glomph]

Part of what makes the 'difficulty' difficult is the energy cost. If you lose that you lose some of the safety of the network.

[antonios]

Here you go: http://www.nxtcrypto.org/

100% Proof of stake, 1 minute blocks, no mining.

[johnny635]

But energy is money. The more money, the more energy.

[plorg]

When xkcd's April Fools comic ran this year[1] I was doing some Real Work on a few of the engineering research servers at my university. When I noticed the jobs were going much slower than usual I popped open "top". Lo and behold, there were 20 instances of a program named 'xkcd', hashing violently, collectively using 90% of the CPU resources. I checked each of the other machines, and they too had been invaded by 'xkcd' daemons. Knowing that it would be over the next day, and that my job could wait, I figured I wouldn't try making trouble for the (presumably) undergraduate comic enthusiasts, but it sure was annoying. I found out later through reddit that there were at least three independent groups of students running the 'xkcd' hashing script on the servers. (A few had also spun up EC3 instances, so presumably they had a bit more skin in the game).

If nerds will do this for nothing but internet points, it doesn't surprise me that semi-public resources will be exploited when there's a monetary incentive involved.

[1]http://xkcd.com/1193

[mkeung]

If cryptocurrencies become mainstream, this will be a bigger problem I think. Even things like "free" electricity are attractive for mining purposes, ex: universities, businesses, etc. If every student setup mining, it adds up (at the university / business' expense).

If I am the one paying for an office at $500 a month that includes all electricity usage, is it fair to plug in a ton of mining hardware and profit / subsidize myself? What if I manage to use more than $500 worth of electricity?

Is shared space even setup for monitoring individual renter's usage behavior? I don't think so.

edit: note, I do mine Doge but with my own stuff at home

[MartinCron]

There is a new extremely "green" office building in Seattle that does meter/monitor individual electricity plugs. It's uncommon, but not entirely unprecedented.

[sliverstorm]

I've actually caught wind of schemes in-flight exactly like you describe, using mining to transfer money from the business to the owner, essentially off the books.

[eli]

Is it fair? That's a moral question. Kinda feels like stealing to me. And, anyway, if you were using electricity at a large enough scale to make this interesting, somebody would likely notice.

[cmelbye]

That's a dead simple problem to fix. Just don't allow for unlimited free access to resources used for crypto currency mining.

[gohrt]

When Google was young, they negotiated an extreme power allowance() from they colo facility, and then engineered their systems to maximize their usage, including packing custom hardware that used for more power than standard equipment per rack unit. It is unclear if the salesperson who signed the contract knew what Google was buying.

(and incoming bandwidth allowance -- yay, web crawler)

[fnordfnordfnord]

I'm currently "ignoring" a similar effort in my lab (~20 workstations). I don't think they've broken a MHash/s yet out of an estimated potential ~2-3MH.

[46Bit]

We recently received an email about our Comp Sci labs (300+ GPU-equipped workstations) being used for bitcoin mining at night.

[optymizer]

This was a young researcher who's access to the cluster was never revoked when they left a few years ago.

Original e-mail Harvard sent last week:

------

Dear all,

I really hate having to send notes like this to our community - especially one as smart, gifted and talented as you all are, but anyway here goes...

Yesterday we were alerted to an unfortunate situation by one of our community members using the cluster who spotted an anomaly with a set of compute nodes.

Long story short, a "dogecoin" (bitcoin derivative) mining operation had been set up on the cluster consuming significant resources in order to participate in a mining contest.

I do want to also quickly state that we do not inspect, examine or look at algorithms and codes that are executing on the cluster, we respect your science and assume we are all good citizens. However, in the course of business, or as happened yesterday, if we are alerted to unexpected behavior we always investigate the cause of any issue.

So, to put this simply:

Harvard resources can not be used for any personal or private gain or any non research related activity.

Accordingly, any participation in "Klondike" style digital mining operations or contests for profit requiring Harvard owned assets to examine digital currency key strength and length are strictly prohibited for fairly obvious reasons. In fact, any activities using our shared resources for any non scientific purpose that results or does not actually result in personal gain are also clearly and explicitly denied.

As a result, and as guidance and as warning to you all, I do need to say that the individual involved in this particular operation no longer has access to any and all research computing facilities on a fully permanent basis.

Don't let this happen to you.

[TeMPOraL]

Well, there you go.

This kind of use was sorta obvious since the dawn of Bitcoin (and even before; in my high school people were running SETI@HOME screen savers on all school computers to build up ranking points for their team). I'm not sure why so many people act surprised.

[notacoward]

Would it really surprise anyone if it was revealed that stuff like this already happened with Bitcoin? Seriously, give a bunch of hackers with access to racks full of Other People's Machines, plus an obvious way to turn cycles into money, and the only surprise would be if they didn't take advantage of the opportunity. I for one expect this to be the norm for every cryptocurrency from now until the end of time. The only question is how much of it the rest of the world is willing to tolerate.

[userbinator]

While I think there are many interesting properties of cryptocurrency and the potential applications, I also can't help but think that this mining is just an extreme waste of computing power; compared to other uses like research, application development, hosting a website, even gaming (entertainment), mining (use for heating aside) looks like it's not much more than using computing power for the sake of using computing power, which I find extremely disturbing.

[logfromblammo]

I have heard people say that scrypt is better than SHA256 as a basis for cryptocurrency because it doesn't put all the network power in specialist ASIC boxes, but then stuff like this happens.

Do you think Harvard would have paid for a custom-build scrypt-coin miner if someone wrote a real academic proposal for it?

[mkeung]

I don't see why not, custom-built just means grabbing consumer grade gpus, with the "best" one currently the R9 270, which is ~$200 usd each. I don't think you need a huge budget so for academic reasons, why not. Plus, there are many scrypt coins out there (or they could even create harvardcoin) they could use for research purposes.

Don't need to necessarily use the mainstream profitable ones

[steveklabnik]

There have been some claims that an scrypt ASIC is coming soon, but I think it's mostly vapor so far.

[maaku]

scrypt ASICs have better performance relatives to GPUs or CPUs than sha256 ASICs did.

[tod222]

From the article, Odyssey's Top500 page: http://www.top500.org/system/175596

It debuted in 61st place in 6/2008. By 11/2010 it had fallen to 434 and has since dropped entirely off the list.

At 6 years old it's fairly long in the tooth now.

[ngcrawford]

As someone who's used the Odyssey cluster extensively, I can add that the most nodes I've run consecutively is ~ 500. While there are ~ 4000+ nodes on the cluster there's no way any single user could run that many simultaneously.

[waiquoo]

ha, wasn't me

[mgoszcz2]

So it was you?