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NSF Researcher Suspended For Mining Bitcoin
PvtVoid (1252388) writes "In the semiannual report to Congress by the NSF Office of Inspector General, the organization said it received reports of a researcher who was using NSF-funded supercomputers at two universities to mine Bitcoin. The computationally intensive mining took up about $150,000 worth of NSF-supported computer use at the two universities to generate bitcoins worth about $8,000 to $10,000, according to the report. It did not name the researcher or the universities."
This is pretty much at the lowest of the low category, Someone who takes up taxpayer funded computer time to mine Bitcoin, should essentially be barred for life form the facility... and that's for starters.
Is that figure just based on some arbitrary appraisal of the the machine's time or what?
It's based on the rate that the owning entity (typically a university or the DoE) charges for time on it, which is (at least in theory) correlated with the machine's electric, AC (i.e. more electric) and ISP bills, the hardware manufacturer service and support contracts, and the price of the highly paid technicians and sysadmins who keep it working. All of these are nontrivial.
NO. This man is a hero for disrupting those rigged climate simulations confirming AGW. He wasn't in it for the money per se, it's just that mining bitcoin was simply the best way to do it. Plus, mining bitcoin had the added social benefit of further cracking the Rothschild edifice. Power to the people!
now, i sure hope they don't "throw the book at them"...I hope they don't get felonies unless unavoidable and either way no prison time...get them on a hardcore probation for 5 years....
I think it should be a civil matter..... bill the researcher for the computer time intentionally misappropriated for non-work-related activities
This is really no different from an office worker abusing employer equipment for personal gain; e.g. long duration international calls to family placed on the employer's dime.
This is a felony. It's fraud and theft. Good engineers don't get fired for stealing 10% or less of what good engineers in the prime of their careers are making.
He didn't download a movie. He didn't copy that floppy. He appropriated a taxpayer resource to line his pockets.
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
And then imagine if he used that $8000 to buy a computer and an internet connection and downloaded a few pirated songs doing literally $trillions in damage.
My estimates are that he could easily have downloaded enough pirated content with that much internet to cause enough damage to bankrupt the entire world.
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Supercomputers are so last year. Do you even ASIC, bro?
It has exactly as much intrinsic value as the dollar: None. It has value only because people are willing to trade for it.
Not many people though, which is why the value fluctuates so wildly.
He spent 150k of someone else's money to make 10k for himself... Personally he spent 0 to make 10k, plenty of profit.
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Are we supposed to ignore all "lesser" crimes while there are greater ones (even metaphorical ones) outstanding?
THEN...your question would be valid
GP didn't ask a question.
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I agree that the perpetrators of the 2008 financial crisis and LIBOR scandal ought to be severely punished for all the human misery they caused, and personally I would be comfortable with sentences including capital punishment.
But that is that, and this is this. Are you seriously advocating that lesser crimes should be forgiven if there are bigger fish to fry? That people who misuse $150,000 of public funds to line their own pockets with $8,000-10,000 should get away with it because others have stolen millions/billions?
Quite frankly I don't see why it should be an either or proposition. Why not go after all of them?
I will also add that from the report, the miner doesn't sound like an angel worth defending at all :-
The amount of power supercomptuers take is IMMENSE. Like let's say he was using Stampede, the supercomputer at University of Texas. That thing draws 3 MEGAWATTS when fully spooled up. That is just what it draws, not what its cooling system takes, which could easily be another half a megawatt. Now we dunno what they pay for electricity precisely, but looking at industrial rates in Texas with the PUC it runs somewhere around the realm of $73/MWh. So running this thing for just one hour spun up costs $250ish. Just the raw power cost is a lot.
Now I'll grant you, it uses some of that at idle. However even if all the systems just drop to idle power, and it doesn't shut down unused nodes, it'll still easily be 10% of that based on what our Dell servers use (the system uses a bunch of Dell servers with Sandy Bridge Xeons in them).
So never mind CPU time costs, maintenance, wear, other research getting delayed, etc, which is all very real, pure power usage is a lot for a big supercomputer.
Power costs is something many coin miners never seem to factor in. They'll crow on about their "profits" but if they deduct anything, it is just hardware costs. They don't seem to bother to analyze how much power their computers are using to do the mining, and then further how much power is being used to cool those computers, if applicable.
when the 1000s of asshats who caused the financial crisis are held accountable...all of them...THEN...your question would be valid
Two wrongs don't make a right. Just because the scumbags in the financial world haven't been brought to account doesn't excuse what this guy (allegedly) did. If he committed a crime and it can be proven in an appropriate court of law then he deserves to be punished. We don't excuse people just because there are other criminals doing worse things.
1. you don't know if he actually wasted anything (the computers could have been idle otherwise)
Not relevant. Even if the computer was idle that doesn't give him the right to utilize it for his own enrichment. Furthermore even an idle computer costs money to operate and maintain, so if he did what he is accused of then it was certainly theft on some level.
2. perhaps he intended to donate the money, or he needed it to help a relative, etc.; you just don't know anything about the situation.
You're going to use a Robin Hood defense? You don't get permission to steal things just because you "intend" to donate the money to someone needy. I could point out that you don't know anything about the situation either. You have no evidence that altruistic motives were at work here. But it doesn't matter. Based on the available information it appears that this person tried to use a computer to enrich themselves or others unjustly at the expense of others. That is a crime regardless of intent. I cannot walk into Walmart and steal something just because I intend to give it away to someone needy.
$150k counts as a lot of electricity. Even at the current difficulty, I find it hard to believe someone could have used that much power to mine only $8k worth of BTC.
Electricity is just one of the costs involved and probably not even close to the biggest one. You have to consider the cost of the computers and other gear amortized across usage, rent/facility cost, support infrastructure, staff, insurance, maintenance, and more. Furthermore you have to consider the opportunity cost if this guy used the system when it could have been put to other more productive use. Opportunity cost is probably where much of the $150K comes from. It was the price they could have sold the computer time for. I run a very small manufacturing company and it costs us around $60K per month just to keep the doors open even if we never produce a single product. The $150K number doesn't mean much out of context but it wouldn't be hard for me to believe a number in the tens of thousands of dollars.
(disclosure I'm an accountant)
I was actually at one of these supercomputer facilities a day or two after it happened and found out then. Too bad they didn't release more information so I could talk about it. :-( Someone in our group amusingly noted though that it was probably the first time that supercomputers had been used to directly make money. *snicker*
He appropriated a taxpayer resource to line his pockets.
So basically, he's the very model of a good capitalist, sharing the costs and keeping the profits. Why should he be punished for his entrepreneurship? Why do you hate freedom so much?
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