NSF Researcher Suspended For Mining Bitcoin 220
PvtVoid (1252388) writes "In the semiannual report to Congress by the NSF Office of Inspector General, the organization said it received reports of a researcher who was using NSF-funded supercomputers at two universities to mine Bitcoin. The computationally intensive mining took up about $150,000 worth of NSF-supported computer use at the two universities to generate bitcoins worth about $8,000 to $10,000, according to the report. It did not name the researcher or the universities."
$150,000? (Score:4, Interesting)
Is that figure just based on some arbitrary appraisal of the the machine's time or what?
Re:Throw the book... maybe literally at him. (Score:3, Interesting)
I may not buy supercomputer time, but I sell to the good ole' US of A's government quarterly. I promise, the OP is probably closer to the truth than you think. That 150k may have been only a day of sporadic use in total.
I know the radio portion of our software we sell for iOS, we charge over $800/yearly for per device license... Not including the support contract, the server software, the database software, the server support contract, the database support contract, the web ui software and matching support, the sharepoint connector and matching support, the Microsoft Lync connector and matching support....
I'm not saying the government pays a lot of money, but, my Porsche is blue.
Re:Throw the book... maybe literally at him. (Score:5, Interesting)
...because you buy time on modern supercomputers all the time, and can give us the real scoop, right?
It's a fantasy in as much as the police reporting the "bust" of 4.8m worth of pot, actual street value probably 80k. Or the MPAA/RIAA saying that piracy costs 70 trillion* in lost revenue every year.
*may or may not be true based on how well we can massage and fudge the fuck out of the numbers.