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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?
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.
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.
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 like to add to this something I've seen others point out before.
Bitcoin's Blockchain grows exponentially larger with time.
In 2 years it went from about 200mb to 6gb.
I'll rough-graph this exponential growth to show you clearly what it means 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.