bitcoin

[Bill Stewart]

My email client is set to sort messages by date but group them by 
Subject: line.
I just happened to notice the following message at the top of a 
recent conversation:
         At 02:34 PM 1/26/2009, Eugen Leitl wrote:
>         Anyone is running it?
>         Any coins yet?
>         Anyone having more than 4 connections? I'm not sure the port
>         forwarding on the firewall worked.

So five years later, bitcoins are a thing, and I hope Eugen mined a 
bunch of them when they were easy.

I recently tried installing a Dogecoin wallet and miner on a spare 
lab machine at work.
Dogecoin's a really non-serious Litecoin variant that's mostly not 
worth anything (something like US$0.0001 - Wow, such coins!), mainly 
used for tipping authors of Reddit articles about cryptocurrencies, 
and I figured it would be ok to run it for experimentation because 
its near-zero value doesn't count as "using work resources to make 
money" (Wow! Much electrons!)

I've found a couple of interesting things running it.
- Litecoin uses scrypt, which was designed to not fit into ASICs or 
GPUs, so people with regular PCs could still mine it, without being 
crowded out by commercial miners.  It turns out that people have 
figured out how to fit it into GPUs, which still run about 10-100 
times as fast as CPU mining, so if I wanted to actually make money 
mining $25 Litecoins I should buy a $100 graphics card; it's not 
worth it for Dogecoins.  (Woof!)
- The spare desktop lab machine has Intel 965 motherboard graphics 
GPU; there don't seem to be any miners for it, unlike the AMD and 
nVidia GPUs, so it's only running CPU mining.  Ok for Doge chow - much coins!
- While running background CPU-burning number-crunchers on a laptop 
is probably just as bad an idea today as it was when I was crunching 
Mersenne primes in the 90s, because of heat and battery problems, I 
haven't been able to verify whether that's still true today.  My work 
laptop has an nVidia GPU, but not one of the high-end ones, and an 
8-core i7 CPU, and McAfee Anti-Virus seems to think the mining 
programs are malware, so I haven't been able to test either one with 
binaries; maybe it'll let me run it if I compile the source myself.

- The network security people at work contacted me :-)  The firewall 
thinks Port 22556 is some kind of botnet, and they got hits from my 
lab machine to random countries around the world.  After running 
anti-virus to make them happy, I checked tcpdump, and Dogewallet-qt 
uses that port to stay on the net and send and receive money; turning 
it on and off turns traffic to that port on and off.  I'll have to 
check the source code and verify it, but I'm assuming it's on 
purpose, rather than a malicious binary distributed by the official 
Dogecoin site or one I picked up by accident.   The miner doesn't 
have that issue - I'm using it with a mining pool, talking to one 
server over a fairly standard port.

So *coin runs over a distributed service that looks a lot like a 
botnet.  Makes sense, I guess.