[mkeung]

If cryptocurrencies become mainstream, this will be a bigger problem I think. Even things like "free" electricity are attractive for mining purposes, ex: universities, businesses, etc. If every student setup mining, it adds up (at the university / business' expense).

If I am the one paying for an office at $500 a month that includes all electricity usage, is it fair to plug in a ton of mining hardware and profit / subsidize myself? What if I manage to use more than $500 worth of electricity?

Is shared space even setup for monitoring individual renter's usage behavior? I don't think so.

edit: note, I do mine Doge but with my own stuff at home

[MartinCron]

There is a new extremely "green" office building in Seattle that does meter/monitor individual electricity plugs. It's uncommon, but not entirely unprecedented.

[tlrobinson]

I wonder how much electricity they use to monitor individual plugs and whether it will actually result in a net decrease in electricity usage...

[boredinballard]

Is that the greenfire campus or whatever in Ballard?

[MartinCron]

I was thinking of the Bullet Center on cap hill actually. Not sure about Greenfire.

[sliverstorm]

I've actually caught wind of schemes in-flight exactly like you describe, using mining to transfer money from the business to the owner, essentially off the books.

[eli]

Is it fair? That's a moral question. Kinda feels like stealing to me. And, anyway, if you were using electricity at a large enough scale to make this interesting, somebody would likely notice.

[pavel_lishin]

At which point does it stop being fair usage of a resource, and become stealing?

[eli]

For me, a good rule of thumb is that if you feel you need to hide what you're doing from your landlord/employer/etc, then you're probably doing something wrong.

[cmelbye]

That's a dead simple problem to fix. Just don't allow for unlimited free access to resources used for crypto currency mining.

[mkeung]

but in a large building / campus, they can't possibly monitor electricity usage per individual or company occupying the space without upgrading the infrastructure significantly.

[userbinator]

And things like a class of students sitting in a lecture theater with their laptops plugged in, are they mining or gaming or maybe just some hung process is in an infinite loop taking the CPU to 100%?

(I'll admit that I've used a "heater.exe" for warming my hands with a laptop on a cold day...)

[pavel_lishin]

I'm imagining a future where every 'public' power outlet has a credit card reader attached.

[infruset]

You mean a bitcoin interface, surely :-)

[saraid216]

That sounds like an infinite loop waiting to happen.

[pavel_lishin]

Imagine a world of digital sustenance miners.

[eli]

Just because you won't get caught doesn't make it right.

[gohrt]

When Google was young, they negotiated an extreme power allowance() from they colo facility, and then engineered their systems to maximize their usage, including packing custom hardware that used for more power than standard equipment per rack unit. It is unclear if the salesperson who signed the contract knew what Google was buying.

(and incoming bandwidth allowance -- yay, web crawler)