Interesting article - iDrive tried to mine BTC using 3000 servers

[cloverme]

This is a good article for people who want to get into Mining bitcoins trying to use CPU power as a method to mine. In short, you can't use CPU's to mine BTC and expect a good return. I'm a little surprised that they didn't figure out SHA256 at the current difficulty wasn't worth mining on CPU's. I think they would have had slightly better results with a scrypt based cryptocurrency, but not much.

http://blog.idrive.com/2014/02/19/we-tried-mining-bitcoins-heres-what-happened/

[atp1916]

So, actually, one year would result in .4315 bitcoins and $275.08 USD.

I make that much in just 2.5 days with my GPUs.

Noobs 

[hellscabane]

That was a very fascinating read.

Admittedly, as with most companies, just taking the risk of security would automatically nix this issue. But interesting that the ROI would be so low even with the fact that they wouldn't have to pay more for electricity (yay contracts!).

All in all, an extra ~$270 just isn't worth it. Hehe.

[cloverme]

So, actually, one year would result in .4315 bitcoins and $275.08 USD.

I make that much in just 2.5 days with my GPUs.

Noobs 

What I thought was interesting as well as they say "the time spent figuring out the details of the mining process detracted from time that could be spent focusing on our core services". How much time did they spend and not realize that CPU mining for SHA256 was a waste of time? I remember last year, I tried mining scrypt on a 12 core xeon and got like 16 kh/s and then tried GPU and got 490kh/s, it was clear.  

There's someone here in the forums with a project to try and mine using screensavers that I ran across too... I worry about these people.  

[hellscabane]

Will say, they could be significantly better off if they tried this with a CPU-only alt. It'd be very interesting how much they could ROI off of that. Of course though, that's an even bigger security risk. I still don't think the risk-based reward is worth it.

[hostmaster]

Interesting test now i know what s happening with 3k botnet.