In a March 2014 Semiannual Report to Congress prepared by the National Science Foundation’s [NSF] Office of the Inspector General [OIG], the organization outlines an incident in which a researcher used NSF-funded supercomputers to mine bitcoin.
According to report details, the researcher/professor used supercomputing resources at two universities here in the United States to generate bitcoins valued between $8,000 and $10,000.
The National Science Foundation pegs the computer misuse costs at a whopping $150,000.
Said researcher said the he was running tests on both systems merely as a test, but the universities in question add that they had never authorized him to conduct such tests.
The universities include that the researcher had accessed the systems remotely and may have even taken steps to conceal his activities by accessing the computing systems through a mirror site based in Europe.
Not surprisingly, the researcher’s access to the supercomputing systems has been revoked, and the National Science Foundation has issued a suspension against the researcher government-wide.
As one may come to expect, the unauthorized use of computing systems at educational institutions to mine bitcoin isn’t anything new. Most recently, Iowa State University announced that servers holding sensitive student information (such as social security numbers and student identifications) had been remotely compromised and used to mine the digital currency.
With today’s difficulty, it doesn’t quite make sense to mine bitcoin with a traditional supercomputer, as they are nowhere near designed to mine bitcoin.
Rather, today’s most efficient miners are referred to as ASICs, or Application-specific integrated circuit. The costs of operating such mining systems in terms of electricity (such as those manufactured by KnCMiner) are significantly less than that of a supercomputer.
Today’s lesson: don’t use government-funded/educational institution supercomputers to mine bitcoins!
[textmarker color=”C24000″]Source[/textmarker] Bitcoin Magazine
