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Ask Slashdot: Enterprise Bitcoin Mining For Go-Green Initiatives?
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?
"
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?
Why not ask this guy? Seemed to work out well for him.
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/secret-money-abc-virtual-currency-racket-probe-20110623-1ggp6.html
On a serious note. If it were viable, the practice would be wide spread. The serious miners have moved onto purpose built hardware.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/12/05/2242233/race-to-mine-bitcoins-drives-enthusiasts-into-the-chip-making-business
Area51 - We are watching...
From what I have gathered, mining via CPUs is, at this point, not cost effective. It eats more power then it produces in bitcoins. The OP would probably get a better economic result by letting the computers go to sleep.
For a Go-Green initiative, maybe you should consider turning 18,000 computers off over night.
Unless you are getting your electricity at extraordinarily low costs, close to free, the increase in your electric bill will exceed the revenue you can bring in by an order of magnitude or two.
Even if all your computers had the best ATI graphics card that you could use to mine with it you'd be lucky to break even.
I bet your company ends up with a noticeably higher electricity bill, more so than you'd recover in bitcoins. I ran Seti@Home for a month on a single gaming grade system and my electricity bill jumped a staggering amount. But, I'd love to hear if I was wrong.
but I'm not a math expert.
This might be financially feasible, but it is NOT green. Bitcoin mining *uses* more power, and does not produce anything "tangible", meaning something that offsets the use of energy elsewhere.
Idle computers don't actually waste all that much power, especially newer hardware. Mining bitcoin instead would use more power and generate more heat which you would need to get rid of somehow - in short, this is in no way "green", and I'm not even sure you'll break even.
Your issue is that you'll have to mine bitcoin when it's not economically sound to do so in order to have bitcoin available to trade when they are worth something. Good luck selling that idea to the beancounters.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
As far as I know, mining bitcoins is extremely CPU intensive. So unless the bitcoins will be spent on planting trees (or something...), the increase in the electric bill due to the increased CPU power dissipation (more electricity to feed the CPU and more electricity to cool it) makes things less green, not more.
But maybe a new definition of "green" is used here? Such as... "profit"?
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
You have to understand that BitCoin scales the mining difficulty to match the mining power in the network.
Once ASIC miners are out there, you won't have any significant return on investment for GPU mining (CPU mining is already a waste of time). ASICs kill GPUs, which kill CPUs. It's like rock paper scissors where rock destroys everything.
Do something useful for humanity, shut the machines off to actually be "green", or don't lie to yourself and call it green. Mining Bitcoins is not some "greater good," unless you're going to cash out the Bitcoins immediately, and donate the money directly to some other cause.
One, it's a great idea and even if you don't move forward with this plan I think it's important to give the employee kudos for suggesting something new. If everyone came up with a half crazy/half ingenious idea you'd be able to try out a lot of innovative stuff. That said, I think there's some underlying costs you should evaluate up front: there needs to be an administrator for the Bitcoin mining software, (I assume you know this but) your electrical bill should rise up a bit to reflect the increased power draw when your cluster is crunching numbers and there needs to be a way to record any incidences where you think the BTC software ran into the day or inhibited a normal work related job on the server. That shouldn't be a deal breaker, just have a system in place to assess those monetary incursions on your business. It may also require you to do some interesting tax claims as you might "earn" so many bitcoins that your accounting department has to start including it on an asset sheet so that the books stay legal. I'm not an expert in this.
Something that is important is that the sooner you get this up and running, the better. Read up on the distribution of bitcoins to understand what I mean.
Is it viable? Would we generate enough revenue to cover our electrical costs even with CPUs running at 100% utilization all evening?
Probably? The real problem is the volatility of BTC on trades and, if you become a major reserve of BTC, you would likely have difficulties realizing your USD valuations of BTC in one swift action. One day it could make sense and the next day it could be a bust all based on whether MtGox was hacked or some major holder cashed out. How exactly did you plan on evaluating these holdings?
Personally, I wouldn't do this. I'd take a more entrepreneurial approach and attempt to lease CPU time to new customers. I know this practice has grown less profitable as people have been better equipped to set up their own clusters but what you might do is look into software that rents out your cluster by the hour and then seek out customers. As far as I know you can only expect a couple cents an hour per core on something like that but it slowly adds up. Plus, it's a little more legit and on the level.
Another idea is to lease this downtime as CPU usage to a local university or high school or something and, whether they use it or not, you might be able to write off some of that donated time and save a little money on taxes or at least build good will.
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?
I'm not an expert in this but I'm pretty sure the answer is simple: when a botnet is up, it takes commands instead of issuing information back to the command and control. The idea behind a botnet is more frequently to control millions of random desktops from one central point. If botnets phone home with a new wallet or information, you run the risk of being traced more easily, being detected more easily and also DDOSing yourself if your botnet gets out of hand. That's my suspicion anyway. I'm sure some do do this, they probably just can't get very large.
My work here is dung.
I didn't see your electricity cost anywhere in the post. It seems like that's really what it's going to depend on. Your HVAC costs will go up as well.
I don't think it's best to post the TRUTH in Slashdot comments. Please contact me here.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Using more CPU = using more power
So this is not really green
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The one thing that jumps out at me immediately is that, for almost any modern computer, a computer which is powered up but otherwise idle is going to draw less power than a computer which is mining bitcoins. If you want to use GPU mining (and, realistically, if you don't, this is probably a waste of time since you'll probably never mine any bitcoins) then I think you'll find the power draw from a mining machine is substantially higher than that of an idle machine.
So, what you need to do is work out your idle power consumption (with, say, a Kill-A-Watt meter), then work our your fully-loaded power consumption (preferably by trying to mine some bitcoins, but you could get a reasonable quick estimate by firing up a modern 3D game), work out the delta, which is your effective power consumption for mining, and then use one of the various calculators out there (e.g. http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/) to decide if this is a profitable venture for you or not.
How would wasting electricity by mining bitcoins on CPUs and then increasing cooling demand from your HVAC system be going green at all?
I'd genuinely be interested in hearing the logic behind that, have you considered burning all the worlds forests in order to make some road salt too? I'm sure that's green too, somehow.
Bitcoin mining right now is barely profitable using GPUs, and has been a complete waste on the CPU for over a year.
Just because the machines are on 24/7, you cannot add load to them without increasing their electrical consumption. I have a desktop that idles around 80W, and under full load can reach 400W. And don't forget, every watt a computer uses means one more watt of heat that needs to be removed.
The desktops, unless you have gaming-level GPUs in them, aren't going to turn a profit just on the electrical costs. The HPC might, depending on what sort of hardware is in it. If you're set up to do a lot of GPGPU computing, it would work well. Or if you have FPGAs that you can configure for mining. But if it's just a bunch of CPUs, it's not going to work. Bitcoin mining was explicitly designed to be embarrassingly parallel - the only thing that matters is throwing a lot of wimpy cores at it.
I've run a bitcoin CPU miner on a server attached to a current meter and I can tell you the current drawn goes up massively when compared to idle. On top of this the fans spin up to maximum and lots of heat is generated, so there will be AC costs too. So you can't just take the view that 'the servers are on overnight anyway' - the extra computation has a real cost. My understanding is that even for GPU mining it's hard to break even on power costs these days so I'm highly doubtful that CPU mining is worth it.
Get a "Kill-O-Watt" for about $20. Test a PC at idle. Then load up the bitcoin processes, and test again. You will indeed find that the PC is drawing considerably more power under load than at idle. Multiply the increase in wattage by the number of hours in a month, then by the number of PCs you're talking about, and then divide by 1000 to get the increase in kilowatt hours. Multiply that by your cost of power per KWh.
Then go read how increasingly impossible it's becoming to mine coins, and how you'll have a very difficult time getting one.
Then don't do it.
I agree. Better to lease the CPU time to a local university or anyone else who wishes to pay - is there a market for this out there? I'm sure I remember hearing out this somewhere.
Definate kudos for the idea. This inspires the leasing out to a University or similar who might be able to bee more green as a result and then you are lining up on that green goal... assuming making such processing available isn't like roads and actually encourages growth.
A blog I run for the wealth
You leave 18K systems on 24/7 so you can do a once-per-week virus scan and a twice per week backup? Really?
Going green would mean saving CO2 emissions. Running all the CPU' s your organisation owns at 100% during off hours causes extra CO2 emissions. At least SETI@home or Folding@home do calculations that may be sort of useful to someone, maybe. Bitcoin is literally calculating arbitrarily difficult hashes. In theory it makes bitcoin more secure but not really since most of the mining resources are owned by a tiny number of mining pools and even thousands of CPU' s and GPU' s mining around the clock would make a negligable impact and still allows big pool operators to double spend or fork the blockchain if they feel like it.
Bitcoin is literally the worst idea ever.
if the computers have GOOD gpus, then it might be cost effective.
If you are mining on cpus, forget it.
So one thing I should throw out there we're already very, very green compared to many companies. We are positioned near a local river & lake for cooling needs and use a solar farm (no I don't work for Apple in NC). All building roofs are painted white, etc etc etc. All laptop users are required to run on battery power throughout the day until 20% and then they plug in. Compared to your average company on a grid, we're already about 60% green and our electrical bills now are about 75% lower than they were 5 years ago accounting for inflation and the market and other offsets and adjustments that bean counters like to do. Our goal is to shave off another 10% within 3 years EITHER by consuming fewer resources or by offsetting our costs (ie: making money that covers electrical costs) or both. Please add your comments to the main thread, not this one just wanted to throw this out there as some additional information.
You too can contact me for server space through the same link. Let's please not clutter Slashdot with this.
You mention SETI in the post, but why not pick some distibuted projects that are useful to your company to help push the research forwards? Most big companies want to find ways to improve their public image, this is a great way to do it.
There are many options: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php
If you don't already you should look into getting a special deal for power consumption at night. It should cost much less than powering on in the daytime. In fact, if you could have your system off in the daytime and only run it at night you could likely get really good deals in certain electric markets.
If then entire value of this thing is predicated on finding SHA256 collisions, then we need ask "what is the practical value of an SHA256 collision?" Looks like some one or some group has found a way to fraudulently-sign-digital-certificates@home. Is that something you want to participate in, especially in a way that can be traced back to you? :-)
Your competition is botnets, they consume no power to their owners and the return is hard to beat. Your far better off from a financial stand point to put those computers to sleep. Your also running against bit coins becoming always harder to make with time. Bottom line is that the cost of making them is more than the return. That is why botnets will free to make them, they aren't paying the costs.
Take 10 computers and mine coins for 30 days. This test lets you know about how many coins you can expect each machine to produce.
Then take 100 computers and mine for another 30 days. This will give you even better numbers, but the goal of this test is to see the impact of a larger deployment. Deploy to these 100 like you would to the 18,000 and monitor to see if you can minimize the user impact.
Take this info back to your team as proof of concept. You should have enough data to calculate the return on investment. Make sure you calculate the cost of power for these computers working harder. A idle computer uses much less power.
With that said, take a serious look at the current generation of VDI. You could have low power clients talking to high end servers. VDI is growing up fast.
There is nothing green about bitcoin mining it is total waste of power. All miners work on the same calculation at the same time so the work being done can be done by one computing device only giving you the same result.
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
It's amazing how often people consider the cost of something is free or negligible because their electric bill and paycheck come in separate envelopes. I wonder how popular electric cars would be if the charging station looked like a gas pump with a dollar amount on it.
You are better off powering off all the unused machines at night and saving your company quite a bit of money.
kinda off topic but:
who would've thought that one (1) bitcoin would be worth £58.00 Pound Sterling, €68.60 Euros, $87.60 U.S. Dollars, $89 Canadian Dollars, 4,792 Rupee or ¥8,291 Japanese Yen, 515 Norwegian Krone so soon? Wow. i'm actually tempted to buy some bitcoins now and sell them at a higher price later this year.
as long as i don't loose my wallet, i'll be fine.
I never understand the appeal of bitcoins. All transactions are basically public information subject to any number of statistical methods to develop profiles of user activity over time. Your local paper currency still wins out big in the areas of privacy and legitimacy nor is it clear that governments would actually continue to tolerate the usage of bitcoin if it ever popped its head out of the ashes of irrelevance without subjecting it to at least the same rules as normal currency. Perhaps this is unlikely due to the self limiting nature of coin circulation.
Like a chorous caroling under a troll bridge if you want to go green turn the goddamn things off when your not using them.
When CPUs go idle, they consume less power. By keeping them pegged at full capacity, you're using more power, not the same amount. I'm not even sure how this is green at all, ignoring the whole Bitcoin angle.
Anyone else notice that this question is being asked during a massive bubble period, and what is necessary to prop up a bubble is public awareness? Just like my post just now is shamefully unrelated to its parent, might the true purpose of this Ask Slashdot be to bring in a few more suckers before it crashes down to 15 or 20?
I will admit my biases against Bitcoin and my post history speaks to this, but this is a tactic also used to prop up stocks and precious metals. So yeah, I'm calling out TFS.
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
Bitcoin miners use GPUs, which are orders or magnitude better than CPUs at Bitcoin mining. Unless your server has a high-end GPU in it, you will probably get nowhere (even assuming that the underlying idea is sound, which it is not for reasons pointed out by other posters).
If this is your "Go Green" initiative, you either don't understand Bitcoin mining or "Go Green" means something different than most would assume.
Apparently /. has started to allow 12 year olds to post again. Please go back to pretending you have a life on Facebook and leave /. to people that don't have to pretend their existence is greater than their phone tells them it is. :P
I've done some testing. I tried to create conditions for success.
1. I had handy an M18 R2 - with dual 7970s.
2. I work a lot of hours and my kit is used by my employer. In trade off I use some juice for testing.
3. CPU bitcoining is worthless - just forget about it totally. Anyone telling you that only high power GPUs, FPGAs or ASICs offer a return are correct, and thats before ever discussing power.
4. I am vaguly able to generate 0.05 BTCs a day in test conditions. This currenty equates to 1/20th of a bitcoin per day, so 20 days would get me around $75.
Notes: At current rates, it will take 400 days to recover the cost of the laptop - assuming power was free, which it is not. Power draw is not far off a nasty P4 desktop box - but daya by day 24/7 I don't like the look of the power costs.
ASICs and FGPAs seem to be full of start ups, and small companies offering various now and future hardware and G/hs rates. These offer performance that will - as far as I can see eliminate GPUs in the near future, and make BTC mining the home of specialist miners only. Which is perhaps where it needs to go given the silly power required now on commodity hardware for minimalist return.
I can't really equate this being green, in any way, no matter how I cut it. I think the idea is to cut your power use, not get creative in trying to generate money of silly power usage.
I think previously, some crazy folks might have been able to make large btc mining operations on commodity hardware - I think its moved away from that now. At least where I live, and with energy costs what they are.
And the figures now are not what they were, when BTCs fell to 2$ - its fairly scary to see the loss basis if you make assumtions of hardware costs/ profit. For me, it has to be hobbyist mining, and with no direct aim 'to make' money.
If someone else buys your hardware for you; and if someone pays your power costs and colling / air con costs - then on the surface money could be made... but its a mirage really. Someone has to pay
We`re all equal
I'd recommend looking at the World Community Grid and BOINC. You can pick any number of projects to contribute resources to from solving clean water problems to finding a cure for AIDS to processing massive antennae data sets to detect asteroids that may be on a collision path with earth.
Bitcoins are currently trading around $75.
Until the imminent pop, at which point all those bitcoins you were hanging on to because they were going up uP UP! are now worth squat, and there's still a giant power bill to pay.
Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
You make me sad with your complete lack of either bel-airing *or* "that dog's not so shaggy" at the end of that. Don't you know long, rambling, pointless, off-topic posts are required to end with one of those memes?
As long as a majority of CPU power is controlled by nodes that are not cooperating to attack the network, they'll generate the longest chain and outpace attackers.
If you can get enough CPUs together to break that requirement, then you'll be able to make some real money.
Save the energy, let unused system sleep.
Let's say a single, ATIx7xx (or better) graphics carded desktop (anything else is not price-effective) consumes ~250 Watt on idle (reasonable estimate).
Let's say you mine with it - you now consume ~350-550 Watt per desktop, let's say, average of 150 Watt per desktop increase.
With 18000 desktops, that would be, if we are careful with time allocation, (8 hours x 150 Watt x 18000 desktops) / 1000 KW/h increase in power consumption, per night.
That is ~21600 KH/h increase in power consumption per night, or 648000 KW/h increase in power consumption per month.
Now, as it is (and it is a floating, quicksand value), 1 GH/s gives you ~2-2.5 BTC per month.
150 Watts of low-medium ranged ATI card gives you ~100 MH/s, (which you want to run @ 50%, for your offices will catch fire, and no, I am not kidding). So that is ~50 MH/s optimistic value per desktop (remember, provided they are optimally equipped, that is, ATI x7xx cards or better).
50 MH/s x 18000 desktops per month is 900 GH/s per month. That would amount to ~1800 BTC, which go by $70-80 right now, say $75. So a profit of 135000 $ if you somehow can convert them to useable (spendable) form.
Now take 135000 bucks per month and substract from that 648000
KW/h per month (where I live 1 KW/h is about 20 american cents).
So you substract from 135000, 129600 Dollars for electricity, and you are left with 5400 Dollars profit (provided you have god like ability to convert that amount of bitcoins to real, useable currency at such rates).
So, in perfect world conditions, yes it breaks even, barely.
Sorry if there were any crude errors, but you get the point.
I have nothing to lose but my bindings.
You need to get it straight, in your head, about what you're trying to do.
When you're talking about a "nice -n 20 ionice -c 3" job (or its equiv in whatever OS you're using) the idea is that there are some resources being used over time, which happen even when the processor is idle and are independent of power. As an extreme example, if you have to have a thousand computers, then you need to have a building for them to exist in, and they're costing you money even when they're turned off. The other extreme is using the CPU to turn the local power utility electricity into money, which is probably a loser unless your hardware is very special, and it's likely that your hardware isn't special. In between the two extremes, are various gray areas where the tradeoff is different, and the question is whether or not your specific pieces add up to a positive or negative sum.
That is a wise question to ask, and I wish you the best of luck in getting the answer. It's very complicated and requires someone much much smarter than me.
But as soon as you start talking about letting this project take resources away from other work (dedicate 30% even when in use), you're headed into a whole other area. You're concentrating on one of the extremes that I mentioned above, the worst case scenario where you're just looking at CPUs converting energy into money. On one hand, that's going to be easier to answer. On the other hand, the answer is very likely No, unless you have exotic hardware.
If it doesn't look profitable, present it to the boss as "competing" with your existing business. If it does look profitable, then call it "diversifying." ;-)
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
OK, upon further thought, I made an error wherein I allowed for 50 % reduction in hashing rate but not 50 % reduction in power draw. Also, your power cost would be lower or higher, I have no idea.
In the end, it is viable, but the headache and amount of work, especially at such scale, would not be worth it (and I am really serious about fires, in the offices, and the potential of such - where would you put extra ~1500 KiloWatts or heat ?).
This is anything but green, if we could mine bitcoins withn idle CPU looks we'd all already be (bitcoin)millinaires.
I have nothing to lose but my bindings.
"Go-green."
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
The biggest problem I have with bitcoin is that it is based on wasted effort. Unless we find out one day that bitcoin was all a scam to get the internets to break some magical encryption scheme for some interested party, all the effort spent "mining" bitcoins has literally been thrown away. The same energy spent mining bitcoins could have been spent folding proteins. But instead of bitcoins being tied to some useful processing in that fashion, they are based on waste. Bitcoins are inherently wasteful, and thus inherently evil. That doesn't really separate them from the typical western lifestyle, but it is more than a bit pathetic that everyone jumped on a currency based on conspicuous consumption.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Go Litecoin, or Namecoin, or something else that will become a competitor to Bitcoin.
In the end, it's all virtual currency anyways, even the US Dollar (which is a fiat currency, and thus essentially virtual.)
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
In a former career, I had loaded idle-time cancer research software on our office machines. I had permission from the manager to do so. One of our employees was offended because she had a family friend die of cancer and she didn't want to be reminded of cancer. The app was only a tray icon to her. It made no sense that she wanted this removed from her computer but I complied. It also made no sense to me how the cigarette breaks she took every other hour didn't remind the bitch of cancer either. No, she wasn't a nice person and she did end up dying of cancer within 5 years herself.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Running bitcoin will just increase your electricity bill, so it's just a gamble. If you actually want to go green as you claim, how about turning off the computers? The updates only occur weekly. The backups only 2-3x a week. At my old job I knocked up a system that monitored users' PCs for idleness, shut them down (as long as no whitelisted processes were running, such as Word), and could also wake them with WOL if they were needed for anything (distributed video processing in this case).
"Once" is not "when". "When" is definitive, "once" can be speculative.
I have nothing to lose but my bindings.
I was wondering about whether computing resources could be donated and you get a tax break. Found this related thread.
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=7201
Key is as others have mentioned that your resources are most likely using minimum power when idle and increasing use will increase electrical fees, air conditioning fees, and might I suppose also wear them out sooner if it uses disk space.
Also imagined you might have enough scale to sell elastic computing services but there is a competitive market for that too.
Was this a troll question? If you want to go green put those 18k machines into sleep mode and you will save a ton of money on electricity.
(Reducing energy? I reduce energy every time I add oxygen to carbon. Look, now it has less energy!) Just kidding, I know what you meant. But it was still wrong.
You're under-rating money. Money is power in the very most basic sense (and coincidentally, the whole topic of bitcoins is about restoring that equivalence, as some people see fiat currency as decoupling money from its power). Making money (if only you could do it totally without any negative consequences or side-effects, which I'll admit you can't) really would be green, because with money you can, say, plant forests to soak up CO2, do the expensive shit needed to clean up industrial waste sites or restore mountain tops, or simply use the money to abstain from destructive necessities (e.g. "I don't have to drive to work today, because I don't need to work."). If infinite money representing real resources fell out of the sky into our hands, the whole planet would turn into a hippie paradise overnight (but hopefully without all the patchouli and chlamydia). Don't discount money. Ultimately, the long-term promise/fantasy of cheap solar and fusion energy, is just that.
Similarly, pretty much every single damn non-green activity that happens today, happens because of avoiding monetary consequences -- it happens precisely because we under-rate money as a means of measuring things. When you say you can't put a price on a beautiful meadow, you're saying "fuck this meadow, let's build a parking lot here." If you really had to directly pay to clean up your pollution, repair your environmental destruction, etc, as you did those things, then you'd stop doing them. So would that megacorp that you don't like, if they had to pay.
I swear to you, the very essense of a green "victory" will be a strategy of removing externalities; to make everything be "about money" -- accurating measuring, assessing, collecting that money and using it to restore or protect environmental value.
Within that framework, making money will be good. Making money will mean that you're not polluting (or you're polluting little enough that you're doing more than enough good to offset it), because polluters will be the ones who are losing money, since they wouldn't be generating as much wealth as they use up as pollution.
If this guy can collect solar rays -- or (I'm very serious) even burn coal -- and turn it into usable resources for a net gain, as long as it's a true net gain where his pollution isn't subsidized, then that's green. Infinitely sustainable.
Loss is what can't be sustained. Next time you see something unsustainable, maybe the question is: where's the loss? How come I don't see it? In what way are we using government's power to hide it from the market?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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
Or, you know, you could do something actually useful and run folding at home.
Did you ever ask yourself why the NWO, or the SEC, or FED, or IRS does not interfear with bitcoins?
it's not worth it. And as more ASIC"s hit the market, GPU's will become unviable to make back what you spend in electricity. As it is, it's getting close to that point with FPGA's already out last year using much less watt per mh/s.
You PC idle is prolly 200-300. And again only the AMD gpu's are good at BTC mining. Nvidia stink and most intels don't have openCL and stink even worse then nvidia.
You also have to think about heat. Running full load over night if the machines are near each other is going to create lots and lots of heat. Your AC system may kick on when it never did before over night. Causing even more electricity to be used.
You'll spend more in electricity then you make back.
Just put them to sleep for like 6 hrs each night and you'll save a ton.
I am sure the computers in the NCC1701-E would be able to calculate Bitcoins very efficiently and the power souce does not emit CO2
Engineer: Sir, sir, sir! Our HPC has detected an asteroid of catastrophic proportions hurtling directly toward Earth with a 99.993% chance of a direct center of mass strike! ... ... ... this is madness! ... I have an inkling they're going to become a hot commodity ...
CEO: Excellent, did you prevent it from phoning home to their main servers with this information?
Engineer: Yes sir! Just as you instructed, the world awaits you to heroically deliver this vital information of a massive threat that is currently a needle in the a haystack
CEO: Good work, now go out front and remove the sign under our logo that says "Do No Evil."
Engineer: Um, sir? Time is of the essence
CEO: I SAID DO IT! Then get me a big chair and a cat -- preferably black and lethargic. Then get me every world leader on a video conference. *evil laugh* Would you like your Christmas bonus in Renminbi or Euro?
Engineer: This is
CEO: Hmmm, you know what, you're right. It'd be stupid to do that without first buying up bunkers and portable generators
My work here is dung.
It can't be profitable in the limit really, or it would be 'free money' with a trivial investment. But maybe initially.
But -- you're consuming more energy. This is really only green if you know your electricity is green.
Don't forget the increased HVAC in the summer, and (possibly) decreased heating costs in the winter. If it's a computer lab with 50+ systems you're probably cooling it in the winter just because of people and bodyheat.
I never really liked...the antivirus stuff most people do. It's a pain in the ass and gets in the way.
In all seriousness:
Why don't you have wake on lan and some good scripts at most places?
Have a policy that computers are turned off when you're finished.
At 00:50 you can ping systems twice -- index any that reply. Those are systems that probably should have been turned off. You not only email the owner to check compliance, but you need to remotely execute a slightly different updater.
At 01:00 you send wake-on-lan across enterprise
at 01:10 you push out bundled AV updates
- halt systems that you had to wake
- leave systems running that were on
At 07:45 or 08:45, you send wake-on lan and can have additional updates.
I always *HATE* seeing corp desktops where the 'policy' is to get in 20 minutes early to hit power, take a shit, grab coffee, read news on the smart phone while it does their desktop security crap. If I have to be in the office early to turn it on, you have to pay me.
The technology to handle this has been available for at least a decade, and probably way longer.
You can modify this and do load distribution, avoid power surges etc however appropriate. But the basic concept is the same:
- don't do updates when I get into the office or lab and want to work
- don't give me an opportunity to refuse the update because you try to send it when I happen to power on and am giving a presentation
- keep the updates out of the way and invisible to anyone who isn't in the building at 3 in the morning.
I wonder if the power infrastructure is ready to handle every computer increasing power draw by 5x.
You're an idiot. CPU power is the least green thing I can think of in the world. Your machine sitting idle uses far less power and cooling than your machine sitting idle. Before your nitwit idea comes to fruition, perform a real ROI, not a slashdot ROI prediction. The beauty with bitcoin mining is you can actually compute the stats of how much power and cooling you'll need to produce a single bitcoin in the present time. Within the next 30 days, be ready to have wasted a crap ton of money on power, because ASICs are about to make fools out of all of you.
I was reading a forum discussion yesterday regarding mining bitcoins with a 17w Haswel (the new i7 CPU) and wound up on a bitcoin calculator here...
https://bitclockers.com/calc
There's a chart further down that page that compares different capacities to produce bitcoins.
The $150 Jalopeno box (ASIC) is rated at 4500 MH/s.
The $600 BitForce Single (FPGA) does 832 MH/s.
An ATI Radeon 5870 does 420 MH/s.
No mention of a vanilla CPU. But, HardOCP rated an i7 2600K (4.8GHz) at 4.4 MH/s in 2011. They rated the 5870 at only 380 MH/s.
So, using the calculator and assuming a 2 year old i7 2600K system (no GPU) using 200 Watts at 9 cents per Kilowatt meter rate...
I would lose $12 per month. (Assuming a system value of $0)
And with the new Haswell it looks like I'd be losing $9 per month (plus the cost of the system)
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
A PC has many, many power states- a modern PC may run into dozens. Thankfully, even when a facility is irresponsible enough to leave computers running 24 hours a day, when users need them only for a fraction of this time, the PCs enter various forms of 'idle' states when not actively in use.
Bitcoin mining is inefficient on GPUs, where it can still make sense for PC owners with cheaper supplies of electricity. Bitcoin mining on Intel's putrid CPU FPU subsystem is INSANELY inefficient, maxing power usage and moving the PC into a full-burn power state. The PCs will experience accelerated wear-and-tear, burn through far more electricity than the bitcoins could ever hope to pay for, and do real damage to the whole computer facility for no gain whatsoever.
Unattended, every PC maxing out its CPUs becomes a real fire risk. Many of the PSUs will fail, some catastrophically. With so many PCs, many are bound to have paper in their vicinity.
If I was the boss of this organisation, and read a proposal like this from the IT department, I'd immediately sack everyone involved. Keeping the machines permanently on, using the excuse of updates and AV scans is bad enough, since again the cost risk of fire is incredibly high UNLESS the locations of the machines are occupied 24/7. There can be no excuse for running ordinary unattended PCs in 'max-burn' modes.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Bitcoins can only be created and/or used by people with computer hardware. That's an initial cost that the poor are unable to afford.
Let's hope food, clothing and other life essentials don't become traded by Bitcoin.
With the SSD seemingly "coming into it's own"... sure. With a "comparatively" shorter life span why not run it 42/7? After all, the manufacturers have to make a buck too.
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
"as well as about 18K desktops on 4 campuses connected with dark fiber. "
How about using something like a Group Policy or BigFix to set power profiles that get pushed out so each machine will auto-power down if not in use for X amount of time (even if it means stand-by). For employee machines, make the time longer than public machines... that's what we do here at our university to help save on electricity use (which IIRC from a recent article we use about $2 million a week but I think that includes all the branch campuses as well)
But be aware FINCEN has taken an interest and the "regulation" has begun so before you involve the Uni might want to hit up a lawyer.
You have to sign up for this. "US Begins Regulating BitCoin, Will Apply "Money Laundering" Rules To Virtual Transactions"
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-03-21/us-begins-regulating-bitcoin-will-consider-virtual-transactions-money-laundering
" In Spain, The Bitcoin Run Has Started
trio of Bitcoin apps have soared up Spain's download charts , coinciding with news that cash-strapped ... you want to get a good sense of the stress European savers are feeling, just watch Bitcoin prices.""
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
The current cheapest ASIC boxes used to mine Bitcoins are 4-5 months old, cost less than a midlevel videocard ($150), and they would have you believe that the boxes generate about $1200 per month. I smell fish.
When there's no way to exchange real money for BitCoins (inherent in that statement is my feeling about BitCoin
Just as a mental game, what makes you so sure other 'real' currencies are any more real outside of people's perception of their value?
as part of our go-green initiative we're going to burn as much power as possible to generate virtual currency.
Not CPU intensive. GPU intensive. CPUs are useless now for mining bitcoins (they're not bad for Litecoins though). GPUs do consume much more power under load.
People who smoke marihuana are not junkies. Junkies are people who use heroin.
Use WoLAN to wake machines up at AV and backup time.
If you want to do something with your PC and you are "GREEN" than rather mine PPcoins than Bitcoins, PPcoins do not need difficult calculations to keep the blockchain running, you just need to be online! So less power consumption and later you swap your PPcoins for Bitcoin at www.vircurex.com
...starts talking about Bitcoin, it's time to get out of Bitcoin.
Considering its just desktop pc-s im convinced that they will consume more electricity than you would be able to pay off with bitcoins.
There was something unsettling about Bitcoins as I read through the protocol, I finally figured it out. It's in the plain site, right in front of me, Bitcoins rely on the fact that it is not feasible to reverse the block chain (the proof), however if you have enough time, you don't need to reverse it. But who has enough time with Bitcoins?
The people who invented the algorithm, they had plenty of time to run the generators before they became used by the public. The code is deterministic, no part of it is random, somebody with prior access to the generator code could run the entire sequence (or a large part of it).
You can't handle the truth.