Not that different than running folding@home or seti@home was?
Kinda, and that's why there aren't any more large deployments because school resources are limited. Also one could argue that folding@home and other similar projects are more in line with faculty mentalities than a project that literally is just "I want money and I'm willing to use exponentially more of yours to get it".
Wow they guys with negative responses have you ever been to college? meaning live on campus one. Not a intelligence insult just more about the way a campus is run/is.
Yes, currently attending, having also participated in student projects and their financing. I've also sat on enough admin side committees to know how a school runs.
College is a place for experimentation etc and expanding minds without worry of the rest. The poster noted he was a economics student meaning this is also largely an experiment/project about the economics of cryptocurrencies.
Yes, but in this case the objective is literally point miners to a pool, ..., get money to do stuff.
He has said he showed the IT guys not only what it is but gave them source code of miners so they should be well aware at this point of what he is talking about running on these PCs. Leave the poor guy alone about the idea of it now.
No need to see the source code, the admin obviously hasn't been notified that his machines are going to run maxed out 24/7 minus the actual user interruption, maybe.
CPU mining is beyond retarded, and generating 5-10Gh/s involves running hundreds of machines.
250 computers with a decent CPU will blow through ~40$ of electricity at my really low local rates, so double or triple that for most US locations, per day.
It would generate about 3$ of bitcoins.edit: Just to keep it more simple, a single machine pulling 250W (aka not that much) would cost about 60¢ to run per day, and would generate 0.8¢ per day in revenue. This excludes the wear and tear cost. Multiply by however many machines.
A third year economics student pushing forward on this project doesn't deserve to graduate.