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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?
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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?
For a Go-Green initiative, maybe you should consider turning 18,000 computers off over night.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You leave 18K systems on 24/7 so you can do a once-per-week virus scan and a twice per week backup? Really?
And no AV scans or backups. Unfortunately, not an option for our org but thanks for the info. Any resources or public data available for figuring out the value of BC mining? I've looked but can't find any...
Would it not make sense to alter your AV scan and backup scripts to do their thing, then put the machines to sleep afterwards?
If the goal is truly to "go green", using less electricity is the only way. If you're not looking to go green, but are instead looking to offset some of the money that you're spending now on electricity, turning the machines off will be orders of magnitude more effective than trying to offset the cost by mining and selling BitCoins.
Plus, running 18,000 desktop machines at 100% will put an extra heat load on your HVAC systems, which aren't free to run from either environmental or monetary costs.
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.
If this is your "Go Green" initiative, you either don't understand Bitcoin mining or "Go Green" means something different than most would assume.
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.
This is the most laughable aspect of the damn article: he wants to run a ton of computers at full blast to "go green." Last I checked, the utility company doesn't take BitCoins as payment.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Unless your HPC cluster includes large numbers of FPGAs or GPUs, you'll be quite disappointed at the performance. If you do have GPUs then it depends on the integer operation performance of the chips. As a real world example, my 1 year old mid-range CPU mines at around 1Kh/second. The two $100 video cards in the box mine at 180Kh/s each. The $1500 Asic miners I bought last month mine at 60Gh/s each.
CPU based mining is not worth the power required to mine it and manage the heat.
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?