A member of the Harvard community was stripped of his or her access to the University’s research computing facilities last week after setting up a “dogecoin” mining operation using a Harvard research network, according to an internal email circulated by Faculty of Arts and Sciences Research Computing officials.Dogecoin, a virtual currency which functions similarly to Bitcoin, is a decentralized digital currency that can be “mined” with sophisticated computer algorithms.The individual in question allegedly utilized the high-powered network that Harvard calls the “Odyssey cluster” to collect the coins.“A "dogecoin" (bitcoin derivative) mining operation had been set up on the Odyssey cluster consuming significant resources in order to participate in a mining contest,” wrote Assistant Dean for Research Computing James A. Cuff, in an email to the FAS Research Computing Users Group last Friday.Cuff went on to write that research computing resources cannot be used for “personal or private gain or any non-research related activity.” He wrote that the person involved in the mining operation no longer has access to “any and all research computing facilities on a fully permanent basis.” “Any participation in “Klondike" style digital mining operations or contests for profit requiring Harvard-owned assets to examine digital currency key strength and length are strictly prohibited for fairly obvious reasons,” wrote Cuff.Cuff and several other officials from FAS Research Computing declined to comment on the mining incident, or to specify the individual involved.John C. Lo ’16, who has mined bitcoins in the past, said that after investing in standard, personal computing resources for crypto-mining, it would “take quite some time” for a miner to turn a profit.

However, he noted, if a miner were to use a high-powered network maintained by a university, like Harvard’s Odyssey cluster, there would be few, if any, overhead costs.The timing of the alleged mining coincided with an anticipated price fluctuation in the dogecoin market, according to Timothy R. Peterson, a postdoctoral fellow in the Molecular and Cellular Biology Department.Peterson, who invests in dogecoin himself, said half of all dogecoins on the market were mined by last week, initiating a process called “halving.” When half of the total number of coins are mined, the reward for mining goes down, and with it the incentive to mine.bitcoin zorlukThus, Peterson said, the price of the dogecoin was expected to double shortly after the half-way benchmark.Although the price did not increase as dramatically as expected, Peterson suspected that if someone had mined for many days last week on the Odyssey cluster, the financial gain could have been in the hundreds, and perhaps thousands of dollars.A single dogecoin was worth roughly $.0012 at press time.David Simmons-Duffin, a member of the School of Natural Sciences at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study who received a Ph.D from Harvard in 2012, noted that the Odyssey cluster supposedly used for ‘dogecoin’ mining is quite powerful.“The Odyssey cluster is a bunch of computers networked together in a way that allows fast data transfer between processors.ethereum is backed by

Read more in University News University of Tokyo Joins edXTL;DR I purchased some cryptocurrency mining power in the cloud.I found that SHA256 mining is not that great, but Ethereum mining is more profitable.I plan on investing in more mining power.If you want to jump in right now here are my affiliate links:   Affiliate code for discount ODVnHM Previously I blogged how to mine Bitcoin on Azure (and why it is a terrible idea).In it I concluded that CPU mining is terrible with the advent of cheap USB ASIC miners and that you are better off purchasing one of them rather than wasting cloud computing credits.mine litecoin on iphoneI did more research and discovered rather than purchasing hardware, and running them myself and paying for electricity, maintenance, etc. I could just purchase raw mining power in a specialised mining datacentre.ethereum studio online

I liked that sign up was simple, that you could allocate your mining power/payouts (see below) and most importantly that it had Ethereum miners (look out for future posts on Ethereum!).I decided up front to invest a bit over $100 in SHA256 & Ethereum mining and roughly distribute it between the 2: SHA256       USD $70.81        0.15 TH/s        $0.45 per GH/s      Lifetime contract Ethereum     USD $57.62        3 MH/s            $17.99 per MH/s    1 year contract The reason I liked Genesis Mining was how you could allocate your mining and payouts across the many altcoins.raspberry pi bitcoin storageBelow I’ve included screenshots of the payout screens and my configuration.vendita bitcoin italiaSHA256 The original Bitcoin hashing algorithm.Mining power is being added to this at a crazy rapid pace with ASIC manufacturers trying to cash in and mine as many Bitcoin as they can.

Profitability of mining this will drop rapidly.Here I allocated my payouts as 90% Bitcoin (as that was the point of the exercise) but then 10% into Dogecoin.Dogecoin was created as a “fun” cryptocurrency and the development community has fun with using it as tips throughout Reddit.I wanted a small trickle of this so that I could tip people.X11 Built to be more ASIC resistant by incorporating 11 different hashing algorithms.I haven’t purchased any mining power in this mining algorithm yet, but I plan to in the future.Ethereum Not much in the way of options, as it has been designed to be a unique ASIC resistant algorithm.This is just for Ethereum mining.I’ve been mining for 9 days now and thought it would be a good time to analyse how my mining has been going.Payouts occur at the same time every day, meaning my 1st day only saw a partial payout on the day I signed up.I have removed the datapoint to make the graphs clearer. Ethereum The amount I’m mining each day has been trending very slightly downwards but is more or less stable.

Profitability/day: $2.77 / 9 days = $0.30/day SHA256 Bitcoin Fairly stable mining, but it is trending down sharper than Ethereum.This is most likely due to the rapid pace that additional mining capacity is brought on globally from all the ASIC miners Profitability/day: $1.04 / 9 days = $0.11/day SHA256 Dogecoin A very sudden drop in Doge earned per day.This can be explained by looking at the exchange (see graphs below).Dogecoin isn’t mined directly by Genesis mining, but instead Bitcoin is mined and then converted into Dogecoin.Over the last 3 days the price of BTC has gone down while DOGE has gone up, meaning during the daily conversion of earned BTC to DOGE the exchange rate is lower.Profitability/day: $0.20 / 9 days = $0.02/day Exchange rates for last 30 days Ethereum mining 1 year contact: $57.62 Daily profit: $0.30 Daily ROI: 0.30/57.62 =  0.0052 Yearly profit at current values^: $0.30 * 365 = $109.5 SHA256 mining Lifetime contract: $70.81 Daily profit: $0.13 ($0.11 + $0.02) Daily ROI: 70.81/0.13 =  0.0018 Yearly profit at current values^: $0.13 * 365 = $47.45 ^I do not believe that this will be the true yearly values.

Exchange rates will fluctuate and amount mined per day will go down.I was interested in the SHA256 miners because of the lifetime contract that will always be mining until it is no longer profitable.However I am wary of the long term profitability of it.The chart below from blockchain.info shows the crazy rate that ASIC miners are are bringing on more hashing power.This will rapidly diminish the amount of BTC I mine per day.I do not plan to invest more in Bitcoin mining as I don’t think it will economical to compete.I am very happy with the progress of my Ethereum miners.Ethereum is more resistant to ASIC miners and therefore the amount of global mining power brought should not reduce my profitability as much as quickly as it is with SHA256.Ethereum mining is also almost 3x as profitable per $ as SHA256 mining (0.0052 vs 0.0018).Because of this I plan on purchasing more Ethereum mining power as well as some X11 mining power.But I will not be investing any further in SHA256 mining.I’d like to get some data points from the X11 miner to share next time.