Ask Slashdot: Enterprise Bitcoin Mining For Go-Green Initiatives? 312
Supp0rtLinux writes "Bitcoins are currently trading around $75. I work for a very large organization. We have a fairly large HPC that is usually about 50% idle, as well as about 18K desktops on 4 campuses connected with dark fiber. All stay on 24x7 for after-hours AV scans (weekly) and backups (2-3x a week). All are leases that refresh every 2 years so all have fairly good CPU & RAM specs. As part of a go-green initiative a proposal has come up to use all the PCs for bitcoin in our own mining group; sort of like SETI-at-home style, but with a real dollar value return to us. Additionally, we would setup a queue in our HPC that dedicates 30% to BC mining when in use and up to 99.5% when no other jobs are running. The thought is that all the PCs are on 24x7 anyway and consuming resources so why not allow them to be useful 24x7 as well and generate bitcoins which can then be sold to offset the electrical costs of the running equipment and/or possibly even make a little profit. The guy with the idea says its a no-lose situation as if the price of bitcoins drops to below a certain level and is no longer a financially viable option, we simply stop the mining process. I'm curious what the Slashdot community thinks of this?
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Read on for a few more details.
Supp0rtLinux continues, Is it viable? Would we generate enough revenue to cover our electrical costs even with CPUs running at 100% utilization all evening? Are there any security risks? Any thoughts on network impact? The consensus is that the proposal sounds good, but no one has enough info to make a knowledgeable decision either way. As a follow-up question and one that came up after the initial proposal, this entire idea has us wondering why the botnet/malware guys aren't doing this already? It would seem like a trivial task to take a botnet of hijacked PCs and have them do BC mining instead of spreading more malware and generate real revenue for the owner's of the botnets wouldn't it?
Re:Unlikely. (Score:4, Interesting)
Good GPUs still compete with FPGAs in hashing rate. FPGAs win in power efficiency, but depending on electricity costs and the computers' efficiency, GPU mining can still be worthwhile.
ASICs appear to give at least a hundredfold improvement over GPUs (similar to GPUs vs CPUs) but there are only hundreds or less out right now. Only one company is currently selling and shipping them right now and they're in small batches.
Re:Ask the (ABC) Australian Broadcasting Corp. (Score:5, Interesting)
This.
Connect a Kill A Watt [p3international.com] and compare your energy usage under full and idle loads.
My PC consumes about 60W idle and 250W under full load.
10 years ago it would make sense to use spare clock cycles for side projects, today not so much.
Re:Green schmene (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd like to add to this something I've seen others point out before.
Bitcoin's Blockchain grows exponentially larger with time. [blockchain.info]
In 2 years it went from about 200mb to 6gb.
I'll rough-graph this exponential growth to show you clearly what it means [google.com] At around 10 years you're talking about a 100gb file sitting on the drives of every bitcoin user. At 20 years that 100gb file is now over 4tb. In 30 years that's 9tb. And so on, you can read a graph.
The blockchain is a fundamental aspect of the bitcoin, you can't just start truncating it. It will grow like this forever. Bitcoin will eventually grow so large that it is impractical for even the most diehard of virtual currency enthusiast. The only way to keep it functional is to assume massive advances in technology or that everyone is going to move to cloud based bitcoin banking, letting a third party company do all the processing and blockchain storage. At that point bitcoin would be as equally regulated as any other currency rendering the entire point of bitcoin useless.
The reality here is that bitcoin is an intentionally manufactured bubble. Anyone that understands math and has a reasonable grasp of how large a terabyte actually is can easily see this if they look past the near blinding glamour that the bitcoin proponents toss out to distract you from the truth.
Another point to consider is that bitcoin is not a stable currency. It swings up and down very wildly in value. This is fine if you treat it like an investment akin to trading the Forex markets, but it's pretty terrible not knowing from day to day how many bitcoins it takes to fill your gas tank. If you do get involved with bitcoin be prepared to exit at any time or you risk losing everything. Enron was also a fantastic investment for early adopters. [24x7support.biz]
Re:Ask the (ABC) Australian Broadcasting Corp. (Score:5, Interesting)
s/Kh/Mh/g in the above, I said it wrong.
CPU mining is measured in Khash/sec.
GPU mining is measured in Mhash/sec.
Asic mining is measured in Ghash/sec.
Pool mining is measured in Thash/sec.
Re:Green schmene (Score:5, Interesting)
It is no different than the open source vs commercial or firefox vs IE issue. Being an entrenched monopoly makes overtaking you a slower process but it doesn't make you invincible vs a superior solution in the end.
Re:Green schmene (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't see there as being any inherent instability in Bitcoin. Unless you consider the instability that comes from low volume as inherent instability. A stock with Bitcoins volume and media appeal has price instability as well. But we can agree to disagree here.
But I'll tell you a story. There is an entity billing one of my credit cards monthly for $20. They refuse to stop. I can dispute the charges but only back 90 days. I did this once and had a new card with a new number issued. I just discovered that the charges are still being applied. According to my bank because it is recurring billing it doesn't matter how many times I dispute or change the card number they will continue to pay it. My only remaining option is to put a total block on my account with them, pay off any remaining balance, and then close the account.
As it happens I never entered an agreement. But whether or not I did so doesn't matter. At least, it is none of my banks business. Their primary reason for existence is to make sure NOBODY gets a single penny of my balance without my explicit authorization. If there was an agreement the company in question would be free to try to establish that in a civil suit. So why does my bank refuse to stop giving away my money? They have a backend deal with the merchants and are deliberately breaking faith to maintain their interests over those of account holders (it is a secured card, I don't use unsecured credit so I am borrowing my own money not theirs).
Bitcoin prevents this scenario from even being possible. It is left to me to authorized every pay out. Nobody can pull funds, I have to push them. At the end of the day, my right to decide a vendor doesn't deserve my money is left to my discretion not the banks. If I want to rob peter to pay Paul, this is my choice.
Re:Green schmene (Score:4, Interesting)
The entire block chain contains all of the history of every piece of every coin. But to mine coins, and validate new blocks you don't really need to keep the entire history locally to validate new transactions, you only need to keep the details of transactions that haven't been consumed in another transaction. That's the sole purpose of the log anyway.
Sure the whole log should remain available online somewhere, but even that could be stored in a distributed way. The log itself is essentially tamper proof, since you can verify every single hash and signature if you want to.
While the total number of coins has a finite limit, each coin can be split into a huge number of transactions. Even when the active set of transactions grows too large, there will be solutions to improve the scalability of the system.
These are all solvable problems. There just hasn't been a pressing need to solve them yet.