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."

Comments

Throw the book... maybe literally at him.

[Shadowmist]

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.

Re:Throw the book... maybe literally at him.

[Anonymous Coward]

Where is it written that a "supercomputer" must be efficient and cheap to run?

FWIW, at this point, any "general use" computer is not efficient to mine bitcoin - it only makes sense to use custom-designed ASICs. Unless you get free power, then use as many CPUs and GPUs as you want, but even the cost of the hardware components is going to be pricey compared to your return.

Re:Throw the book... maybe literally at him.

[iroll]

...because you buy time on modern supercomputers all the time, and can give us the real scoop, right?

And then used it for Piracy

[high_rolla]

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.