Can data centers tap unused server capacity to mine for Bitcoins?The question occurred to the team at the online backup service iDrive, which performs most of its customer backup jobs overnight, leaving its 3,000 quad-core servers idle for much of the day.So the company ran a test with 600 servers to see whether Bitcoin mining could become a secondary revenue stream.The result: running Bitcoin mining software on those 600 quad-core servers for a year would earn about 0.43 Bitcoin, worth a total return of about $275.08 at current prices on major Bitcoin exchanges.“Its a waste of time, so any other company thinking about mining with their infrastructure, learn from us,” said iDrive’s Matthew Harvey.You need custom machines to effectively mine bitcoins and generate a real ROI.” The iDrive test-drive reinforced a common theme on Bitcoin mining forums: To earn money by mining, you need to invest in highly-customized computers using ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) to crunch data for creating and tracking bitcoins.

Bitcoin is sometime referred to as the “Internet of money,” a platform using cryptography and software to offer an alternative currency and payment-tracking system.At its heart is a huge distributed computing network that verifies each transaction.Participants in this online ledger are rewarded with new bitcoins, which are issued about every 10 minutes.Over the past year, the computing power supporting the bitcoin network has soared.The cryptocurrency is now supported by a powerful global network backed by 150,000 petaflops per second of computing power, roughly 600 times the combined power of the all the supercomputers in the Top500 list.Practitioners of Bitcoin mining – the term for using data-crunching computers to earn newly-issued virtually currency – are adopting more powerful hardware, pooling their efforts and seeking to slash their power bills.Most serious Bitcoin miners have graduated from CPUs and GPUs to specialized chips such as FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) or ASICs that can be optimized for specific workloads.

This has led to the emergence of a new class of hardware vendors selling custom hardware for bitcoin mining.The horsepower required to succeed in Bitcoin is highlighted by the iDrive simulation, which used 600 servers.“Our study projected a year of mining at 100 percent processing power 24/7 and the assumption that the difficulty of mining (the calculating of hashes) would increase linearly,” iDrive noted in a blog post describing its experiment.“In the end, we learned a lot about the interesting process of bitcoin mining, however, for us, the pros did not outweigh the cons.So, IDrive decided to stick with that we do best.” They’re not the only ones who’ve contemplated repurposing powerful equipment to pursue cryptocurrency, The 4,000-core Odyssey supercomputer at Harvard was secretly used to mine Dogecoin, the ironic virtual currency used primarily for online tipping.The covert miner has had their computing privileges at the university suspended.There are unconfirmed reports today that at least one Bitcoin miner has been raided by police because unusually high power consumption led authorities to suspect that he was clandestinely growing marijuana.

The tip comes from an IRC chat captured by blogger Mike Esspe, though there are no corroborating details.bitcoin traders in mumbaiBitcoin is the anonymous virtual currency that uses distributed computing power to validate transactions.bitcoin fortune storyUsers who dedicate their CPU cycles to the network are potentially rewarded with Bitcoins.nsa made bitcoinIt’s like gold mining, except that instead of digging, a miner uses cryptographic math.bitcoins kaufen erfahrungLike marijuana growing operations, Bitcoin mining runs up high electricity bills and produces a lot of heat because it employs super-fast computers.bitcoin documentary alex winter

High power consumption has previously alerted police to marijuana growing operations and led to busts.china bans new bitcoin depositsAccording to one Bitcoin mining blog, “The Canadian town of Mission, B.C.litecoin vs bitcoin vs ppcoinhas a bylaw that allows the town’s Public Safety Inspection Team to search people’s homes for grow ops if they are using more than 93 kWh of electricity per day.” While it’s unlikely that police will be surveilling the power usage of private residences as a matter of course, it is possible that police will look to electric bills and heat radiation to confirm a suspicion.bitcoin ledger walletBut increasingly ubiquitous prosumer computing could well lead to false positives, not just for Bitcoin miners, but for hardcore gamers, as well as anyone running video rendering farms or web servers from home.buy bitcoin by wmz

It will be interesting to see how courts will adapt to such uses when interpreting reasonable suspicion standards.Jerry Brito is a contributor to TIME.Find him on Twitter at @jerrybrito.You can also continue the discussion on TIME’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.by Tyler Durden In what bitcoin geeks undoubtedly interpreted as a sign of bitcoin’s renewed relevance now that its price is at all-time highs, Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson told CoinDesk’s Consensus conference that her company is now in the business of mining bitcoin.Per the FT: “Ms Johnson noted that Fidelity has also set up a bank of computers built by 21 Inc that can crunch complex algorithms to be rewarded with bitcoin.“My…computer has mined over 200,000 satoshis,” she said, using the name for the smallest unit of bitcoin.Her remarks coincide with an astounding rally in virtual currencies like bitcoin.As DoubleLine’s Jeffrey Gundlach noted on Tuesday, bitcoin is up 100% in under two months, implying that the turmoil in Chinese markets was driving more locals into bitcoin.

One coin was trading at $2,275 Tuesday according to Coinbase, the latest in a series of all-time highs as global uncertainty rises... Johnson also added that Fidelity now allows employee to pay for lunch with bitcoin at the cafeteria in its Boston headquarters.She noted that fewer than 100 employees have paid with bitcoin, demonstrating an unnatural-sounding mastery of industry slang.“I guess we have a lot of hodlers,” she said, using the slang for bitcoin users who avoid selling the currency when it jumps in value.And Fidelity's CEO also revealed information about her company's partners on its journey, naming blockchain startup Axoni, investment firm Boost VC and university initiatives based out of MIT, University College London and Cornell.To date, Johnson explained that Fidelity Labs, its internal R&D division has also set up experiments for bitcoin micropayments and even run bitcoin and ethereum mining operations in the spirit of learning more about the technology.Already, she said, this feature is available to employees who own digital currencies available through the startup's services.