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Title: [2014-02-21] Ars - Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to produce coins Post by: DuckDodgers on February 22, 2014, 11:41:38 AM Quote Love of money can cause people to do unwise things—like stealing time on your university's resident supercomputer to mine crypto-coins. The Harvard Crimson is carrying the story of someone who did exactly that: an unnamed individual who was discovered using Harvard's Odyssey supercomputing cluster to generate dogecoins. Article (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/harvard-supercomputing-cluster-hijacked-to-produce-alt-cryptocurrency/)Calling itself the world's "first virtual currency," Bitcoin offers the … "Wow," you might say, amazed. Dogecoins are one of the multitude of roll-your-own cryptocurrencies that have lately sprouted like weeds in an unkempt vegetable garden. Like most of them, the code that powers Dogecoin's blockchain and network is forked from Litecoin, which was originally billed as a lighter-weight alternative to Bitcoin. Dogecoin (and Litecoin and Coinye and many others) use the scrypt cryptographic algorithm to generate hashes and drive the currency along; media-darling Bitcoin, on the other hand, is based around a different algorithm (SHA256). The currencies are all similar to each other, though they are (generally) incompatible and (typically) do not interoperate. (There are caveats, but cryptocurrencies are complex and I'm trying to keep this relatively short—check here for the full details on how and why cryptocurrencies work.) https://i.imgur.com/rPltYqf.gif Title: Re: [2014-02-21] Ars - Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to produce coins Post by: hilariousandco on February 22, 2014, 11:52:22 AM This should probably be in the alt coin section since it's not really Bitcoin press, but why didn't the guy choose to mine Bitcoin instead of Dogecoin if he had access to a supercomputer? :D
Title: Re: [2014-02-21] Ars - Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to produce coins Post by: Holliday on February 22, 2014, 06:40:56 PM This should probably be in the alt coin section since it's not really Bitcoin press, but why didn't the guy choose to mine Bitcoin instead of Dogecoin if he had access to a supercomputer? :D Supercomputers have sucked at mining Bitcoin for years now. Title: Re: [2014-02-21] Ars - Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to produce coins Post by: creepywheepy on February 22, 2014, 07:17:01 PM It reminds me the movie named "Catch me if you can".
I am really curious how many coins had he mined before they caught him ? Title: Re: [2014-02-21] Ars - Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to produce coins Post by: Lethn on February 22, 2014, 07:31:25 PM I think there should be some acknowledgement towards Harvard for even having the intelligence to spot that their computers were being used in such a way, most schools wouldn't have realised at all because the people never even touch computers most of the time.
Title: Re: [2014-02-21] Ars - Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to produce coins Post by: protokol on February 23, 2014, 10:02:11 AM I think there should be some acknowledgement towards Harvard for even having the intelligence to spot that their computers were being used in such a way, most schools wouldn't have realised at all because the people never even touch computers most of the time. I bet he left it on for days, and the room got so hot the fire alarms went off. Title: Re: [2014-02-21] Ars - Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to produce coins Post by: Holliday on February 23, 2014, 06:48:57 PM I think there should be some acknowledgement towards Harvard for even having the intelligence to spot that their computers were being used in such a way, most schools wouldn't have realised at all because the people never even touch computers most of the time. I bet he left it on for days, and the room got so hot the fire alarms went off. Then maybe he doesn't deserve to be at Harvard because all he needed to do was open a window. They are in the middle of a frigid winter! (Maybe there were no windows in the supercomputer lab!) ;) Title: Re: [2014-02-21] Ars - Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to produce coins Post by: dddbtc on February 24, 2014, 01:54:41 AM This Just In: The computer at one of America's most prodigious universities had its resources redirected away from the world's most important unsolved continuous probability theorem to produce millions of virtual doggy silly tokens!
The world is a wonderful place! Just the fact that this happened makes me kind of happy haha. Title: Re: [2014-02-21] Ars - Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to produce coins Post by: sgk on February 24, 2014, 04:43:37 AM That computer is estimated to run scrypt mining at around 20 megahash/sec. If he managed to run it a few days, then also he made a lot of DOGES
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