Bitcoin Forum

Hello, I'm totally new to BitCoins, but figured I should start mining during the nights at my university. I have 40 computers with NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 at my hands. Is that a good graphic card to mine with?
Which software would you recommend me to use? All the computers have Windows 7 on them, and I have no admin access, so I can't install anything on them. It would be neat with some application that could be stored on a USB-stick.
I've tried bitcoinplus.com, but I have a feeling it isn't optimal.

Thanks in advance, and sorry if my questions are nooby.  :)

Not worth it, you will make virtually nothing and is it worth risking your university placement for a few coins?

That is theft of university resources.

Nvidia cards are notorious for being garbage at mining.
So it would really suck.
At best, you'd pull about as much as someone with a single 6990.
You'd be using about 40x as much power, and you'd also probably get royally screwed.

Thanks for the replies! I thought it was worth a try, but ok - now I know. Maybe it wouldn't be so nice to use the university's resources for this purpose anyway (but hey, these computers are on 24/7 anyway).

Idleing 24/7 is WAYY different than 100%/100% The electric bill auto-magically jumped $800 a month?

I recommended using GUIMiner as it is very convenient to setup and use.
There is a full guide available here: http://bitclockers.com/forums/index.php?topic=3.0 (http://bitclockers.com/forums/index.php?topic=3.0)

I work at a school that has 4000 computers. They are not on all the time. Not saying yours are not, but figure out what bare cpu * (hours of operation) is going to gain you and then figure in the % chance that you will be fired or dismissed from your studies/job and determine yourself whether it is a worthwhile risk or not ;o)

I have complete 100% admin access (I am the admin) but their measly 2-4 and a few 10-20 MH/s are most definitely not worth it... lmao though I wish they were...

Don't do it.

But if you did, use PuddinPop's CUDA Miner, and set the process to above-normal priority.

What mainstream NVidia card is your Quadro similar to?

My 8800GT got 24 MH/s, and my GTX570 gets 112 MH/s

I remember seeing one Lab admin's poster of his SETI @HOME achievement because he set it as the screen saver for all the lab machines.  No one at the University who made decisions seemed to care, but I also doubt they check things like the power bill.

pshhhh, its government money, who cares, right?

No really, Universities are some of the most wasteful spenders of money. For crying out loud, I'll bet those pc's are all Dell's (or similar)! Such a waste!

Mine (any program) when a PC is idle:

http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=9851.0 (http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=9851.0)

I use this nice little program at work (I'm the admin) and have 3x i5 machines doing 13Mh/s each. It's not alot, but 39Mh/s for free, on machines that noone will notice is doing mining, that's fine by me :)

I would recommend grabbing revisor (Fedora LiveCD creator) and creating a 32 bit image with the NVIDIA drivers on it.  If you can't figure out how to install them properly on the image.... just copy the package over and install it manually.

Make a USB image.

Boot the USB image and start a good miner - on old NVIDIA machines you should be able to get at least 5 MHs out of the GPU and up to 8 MHs out of the CPU.  That's 13 x 20 ~ 260 MHs "for free."

You can use at/cron to set a reboot at a certain hour.  Say the lab opens at 8A - reboot at 7:45A.

Move to the next machine, repeat.

If you manage to do it right, no one will ever know you were there....

So much work (making and configuring that CD, burning 20 copies, starting it up 20 times EACH NIGHT) for the equivalent of one HD5830 hashing for 12 hours per night.

I think you missed the "Make a USB image" part. :)

There are better ways - a bit of finesse could set up a PXE server and off you go.

You *will* find SETI/Folding@home already present at most institutions on at least a few machines.  Institutions that use nonsense like DeepFreeze or SteadyState.... even sillier things present....

For relatively decently sized schools the power fluctuation isn't noticeable and I doubt they would care as long as the machines remain usable.

edit -

Oh, also, don't forget to take the most obvious path:  Just ask the lab admins if you can "borrow" a lab over the weekend for an experiment with cryptography.  If you are a student there's no reason they should say no.  Morals, ethics, yadda yadda taken care of.

lol at this guy and so many recently who tries to use public resources for their own good. Gotter love the leaches of the society.

Yeah, but these computers are used for rendering 3D graphics, and sometimes the students leave them on whole nights just to render, we're allowed to.

theft is theft

"Recently," eh?  :)

Again, the guy can go ask if he can borrow a lab.  As he's already said, students use the machines for over-night 3D processing.  There is no difference.

The "Jump to Conclusions" crew can argue amongst themselves now - "it's theft," "you'll get fired," "you'll be expelled," "power bills will spike," "playing violins is fun," "I are teh savior by telling you a $300 investment is better than free resources!"

None of these are even valid if, as a student, those resources are a shared resource that he has privilege to and permission to use overnight.

A few points to consider:
- Large Uni's will often pay a bulk power charge and NOT pay by the Kwh.  Why?  Lights, heating, X-ray machines, etc would cause wild fluctuations in billing cycles.  An extra 3000W is a joke (40 computers @ 75W) to most institutions.

- If power was even a concern.... don't you think most Uni's would be putting exceptional effort into power efficient machines that properly standby, hibernate, rigidly Power-On-LAN/shutdown around a schedule, etc?

- Power shmower, see above.

- You can't steal what you've been given permission to use.

- Your campus Admins are probably already trying it.

- He could potentially use his experience mining at a low hashrate to collect data about cryptography, P2P infrastructures, economics, pools, returns, ROI, etc, etc and actually use BitCoin for a pretty awesome report/thesis.

For educational purposes maybe, but surely not for resale or commercial gain.

Most of the universities where I live have documents you sign upon entering, that indicate anything you come up with using university resources is owned by the university.
(I live by 2 major medical research universities, and 2 major enginerring universities.)
I assume that would include Bitcoins. :x

Seti@Home is VERY different from Bitcoin.  Most Unis would say "oh that's cool" if you were contributing to S@H.

If you were instead using uni resources to earn something that went in your personal pocket that (in the media) is commonly linked to buying illegal drugs online, they'd be singing a different tune.

This just isn't worth it for CPU mining because it is so power-inefficient.

This forum needs multiquote...

Conveniently, as of right now, BitCoins aren't a recognized currency.  Nothing is being purchased or sold in the mining operation - he's not producing currency nor transferring currency nor "selling" anything commercially.

The Student Agreements of most campuses include patentable items - you can't patent a produced BitCoin.

You also can't claim production royalties or ownership on electronically produced assets on commercial applications such as Ebay auctions, Craigslist, PGP keys, Dwolla and Paypal.

So, again, people are jumping to wild conclusions.

The only legitimate concern, as expressed several times, is even if you used 40 machines it's still not very efficient.

if you think that would protect someone from disciplinary action from a superior who actually knew what was going on then you're delusional.

Bitcoins are worth money.  Electricity cost to produce them on otherwise idle machines is non-negligible.  You are transferring resources the school pays for that have a real cost directly into your pockets, and doing a pretty poor job of it.

Amen. The Unis I've been associated with have no problem with their resources being used for outcomes that support course work and/or legitimate research projects. They have all had computer use policies that prohibit commercial activity on them - this is in part because they must software sellers some assure that the software they're getting at cheaper rates will only be used in education.
Doing this - if caught - is a pretty open and shut disciplinary case.

Hmm...

Is it even possible to be caught doing this? Suppose the computers in question are on public user accounts. If you simply set up the account and all of the software using the public computers, isn't it impossible for you to be traced unless someone physically witnesses you doing it? After all, even the bitcoin address is untraceable...

I've now tried this on small scale with bitcoinplus running on 3 computers over the night. It generated a total of 0.0110132 BTC. Probably won't try it with all 40 computer as it seems to be quite a hassle.

What would I be stealing? Who's losing anything? As I said, the computers are used for rendering 3d graphics occasionally anyway, and then they're also using the schools render farm. So bitcoin mining is actually using less electricity than usually.

To be honest, I don't even think the IT technicians at the uni would mind. I know one of them who's involved in the Pirate Party, and pretty open to new innovative ideas. I'd be surprised if he haven't tried this himself.

If they were public computers, probably no. They could trace it to me though, through the key cards used to get into school. These computers, unfortunately, requires one to sign in on all of them.

Over night for 3 computers generating 0.01BTC is scalable if you could cut down some of the waste in the process.  For example, if you made a good revisor image and could quickly boot all of the computers, that scales to 0.4BTC per 10 to 12 hour period (depending on campus hours).  That's possibly 0.4BTC per night for 7 nights = 2.8BTC x 4 (month) = ~8BTC.

If you could reduce the waste (setting up PCs, etc) and streamline it or include other individuals to assist (maybe you could split with one of the IT admins?) you would have a constant trickle of coins.

Even better - if your IT staff is as "interesting" as you say, perhaps you could set up your own individual pool or convince them to upgrade GPUs.  In most cases, I'm sure the students would be particularly enthused to see cards capable of faster rendering (you said you had students using the machines to render, right?).

And for whoever said I was delusional about whatever...  If any of you believe that BTC is an officially usable and measurable asset *at this point in time*.... I'm not the delusional one. :)  You could very well use the project in purely academia and never exchange the coins.

For an analogy - is the school entitled to coins someone earns playing WoW on their personal laptop that is connected to the schools WiFi?  Some schools sponsor a "game night" where users can install and play games on the PCs - what if they play WoW on the network on a school owned PC?  Are you stealing resources for an asset that *might be* exchanged for cash?  What government agency/school/university is going to attempt to sue all of the WoW players because that entity is entitled to a virtual currency the player earned in-game as a result of using that entity's resources?

Surely WoW assets have an extremely larger liquidity market.

So I suppose you'd crack the local admin password on each of the machines (which is remarkably simple) and set up the miner as an "all users" startup program. The only problem with that is that it's time consuming.


Just speculating, by the way. I love speculative hacking. =P

EDIT: Wait, you have to literally use a key card to sign into the computer? That's a bit odd, isn't it?

I think he meant manually sign on...  On a side note, there was a lab that I visited before that required all users authenticate via SmartCards.  It's been built into Windows GINA for quite a while and of course PAM for 'nix, too.  Biometrics are another one that are common in some places - not for security, but for ease of access.  Most Biometrics systems (cough*lenovo*cough) just store the users password along with a biometric key.  When a user swipes their finger - it just provides their normal password.  The opposite of improving security.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa375457(v=vs.85).aspx

In order to "simply" break an admin password, you need physical access and the ability to change the boot media.  At that point, it would be much simpler to use the revisor image I keep rattling on about...... with a little work, you could easily set up a service (init.d script) to automatically start mining on boot with no GUI.  A crond to reboot or shutdown and there's absolutely no trace you were there.

I only mention "no trace" because the goal is to keep the machines production ready - not for the legal implication of evidence.