UnderMining a college campus…

The concept

Everyone has heard of Bitcoins. Whether or not they will grow (personally I hope they do) is irrelevant for this article, because I wanted to try my hand at mining. However, I don’t have a high GPU gaming system, and didn’t want to drop $2-10k on a dedicated GPU miner…. So I was looking in the CPU direction.

Of course, anyone who has done more than an hour of research knows that CPU mining is not profitable: the simple cost to own/run a machine would be more than what you could mine in Bitcoins. But what if you had 10 machines, or 100 and you didn’t have to worry about the cost of running them? The first idea that popped into my (and hopefully many other college students’) head was: I should try this on campus! … So I did. Specifically, at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

How to not be stupid: don’t do this if you are still a student or in any way dependant on the academic organization that you are mining at. Although I wouldn’t go so far to say that it is “stealing” (especially if they are like CU Boulder and leave all of their computers running 24/7 anyways) they definitely won’t like it. But my thought was: worst case-scenario I will have to give “back” the money made from the mining.

The first hurdle to get over was figuring out if the permissions/firewalls on campus computers would ever let me start mining… I got started with mining the same way any good hacker gets started with anything: Google. By far the best (fastest, most concise) article I found was How to Mine Bitcoins by John Biggs. From what he described, I needed a wallet (I used Coinbase) a pool (I decided on two: Slush’s pool andBitMinter) and a miner: I tried several different Miners that John Suggested (GUI Miner, CGMiner, etc…) but the one that finally worked was BFGMiner.

Once I had a single computer actually mining, it was time to optimize. Getting optimization config files for BFGMiner is a bit of a clumsy task when working on a single CPU machine: the hashrate is going to be low, very low… Once I had my config file up and running the most I could get out of a single machine was 30Mhps (AKA next to nothing). The good thing was, once I had my config file set up, all I needed to do was drop BFGMiner on three flash drives, log into every computer in the room, pop the drives in and doubleclick to get up and running!

I wanted to be thorough in my “experiment” so I went on a Friday night and started mining from almost every computer that I had access to in the Engineering Center/EC (about 100 total). If you are/have ever been an Engineering student, you know that it is more than a 5 day/week job: usually the EC is full on weekends as well. So how could I be relatively sure that no-one would touch the computers for a while? Well, I waited until the weekend before New Years, and all through the EC, not a keyboard was stirring, not even a mouse… *Mice FTW!* So this meant that I not only had the weekend, but potentially a couple weeks of open mining!

I watched my mining progress obsessively all weekend, and was pushing ~3,000Mhps most of the time (not too shabby for CPU)! But that Tuesday, everything stopped. No, certain miners didn’t drop out, I mean everything stopped within a 30 minute time period. Uh-oh O_o!

I figured that this meant the IT department had caught on (OK a single student is logged in to every computer in the EC how hard can it be to figure out that something is wrong?) and was a bit worried, but then I referred back to “how to not be stupid”, analyzed my situation again, and felt better.

In total, I was able to mine 0.00289624 BTC over the course of ~4 days from ~100  computers. If you do the math with bitcoin prices today ($811) that adds up to $2.35 (which isn’t even enough to go over the .01 transfer threshold, so I actually didn’t get a dime). WOW! … Not. If I hadn’t got shut down, I could have mined through break and got another 3 weeks (let’s say 20 days) which could have been as much as $15 total… Since I spent ~5 hours researching, setting up and monitoring my progress, this would come down to $3/hr. And even if I somehow ran the miners in the background throughout the year and neverhad to change update or work on any of the computers, I would still be making ~$240/year. That’s pretty shitty considering all of the “even if”s.

As it turns out, I won’t be quitting my day job anytime soon  to travel the country and mine bitcoins off university computers, regardless of my distaste for higher education, and you shouldn’t either.

Until next time…

IP

Edit: 1/08/2014

An interesting bit *BTC pun FTW* of follow up

I received an email this morning from a nice man at UCB OIT (Office of Information Technology) reading the following:

The IT Security Office received a report of Bitcoin mining occurring on numerous computers in the Engineering labs during the period of December 27th through the 30th. Upon further investigation, it was determined that your account was logged into all of the lab computers. This behavior constitutes a violation of campus Acceptable Use of IT Resources policy which forbids the use of campus IT resources for commercial purposes. Future violations will be reported to campus police and treated as criminal trespass. If you feel that this report was in error please contact IT Security at security@colorado.edu.

 Definitely a good call on the “infraction” citing the “commercial purposes” clause which generally includes: monetary gain from the direct or indirect use of campus resources. However, not quite sure about the “criminal trespass” threat. Perhaps this is generally the case for anyone who is not a CU student being on campus, but I find that hard to believe as it is a public university. The appropriate course of action seems to be revoking my access to university computers (I am yet to find out if that has been done). This seems a bit analogous to the situation of bringing criminal justice into sporting events: at the end of the day it’s all just fun and games…

Slightly jaded by the threat, but at least it was a threat and not a course of action… I still have a few tricks up my sleeve that CU doesn’t want to deal with any time soon! 

Source: http://whyalex.com/2014/01/undermining-a-college-campus/