Computer Hope
Other => Other => Topic started by: DaveLembke on April 07, 2018, 11:51:30 AM
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Was poking around on Google Play to see what apps are on there to add to my tablet and crypto currency mining showed up next to a mining game. Decided to check into these. Read the reviews and many of them have warnings that the author of the software is skimming the earned crypto currency as well as others that appear to prey on people using there devices to mine and the people realize only when they go to cash out that the tech support is non existent and whatever was earned with their devices processing and their electric bill was lost.
I found one that had good reviews because people said they were getting paid in the reviews without any problems. The software app is Ethereum Miner which pays a guaranteed payment in microEther. Decided to install this app to check it out out of curiosity. Ran it for 30 minutes and earned 163 microEther with HASH Rate showing real time of 3 to 7 TH/s ( 3 to 7 Trillion Hashes per Second ). Decided to see what 163 microEther is worth and it came out to $0.0000000640264 for 30 minutes of processing time where tablet wasnt used for anything else. Decided to see how much could be earned in a year at that rate of processing. Came up with $0.001121742528 . So If it ran for 10 years and complexity didnt change, which it will change, it would earn 1 CENT (USD)
If my math is correct in the conversion of microEthereum to Ethereum thats pretty pathetic. Additionally in my calculation cost of power consumption wasnt even added in. Its clearly in the negative for profitability. The $40 tablet doesnt even pay for itself to run like this. ::) Here is the site that shows current value and a conversion table towards bottom. https://www.ethereum-price.com/
Well while this was sort of worthless to run, it was entertaining for my 30 minute break. Additionally it makes me wonder if the people giving 5 star reviews even did the math to figure out how much they are losing or " they think they are earning" running this app. While my tablet is not the most powerful out there, the payout is extremely pathetic and doesnt come close to offset power consumption cost.
Lastly the app if you try to do anything else while its running it will crash it and lose where it left off, however you were connected to their cloud, so they just got that however long you crunched data until crash as free processing time for the app developer to earn money on the people who's devices crash out of the app but the data was uploaded to the cloud prior to crash. ::)
I thought Google had some sort of control to keep scam stuff off of their store. But maybe its not a scam if you can get 1 cent in 10 years returned to you while the developer made far more on your donated processing power. ;D
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Google's App approval process is much less restrictive. "Scam" apps generally only apply to fraudulent charges. Otherwise it is "user/Buyer beware".
Anything involving any cryptocurrency IMO deserves to be held at arms-length anyway.
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Anyone who thinks mining will yield a monetary find is delusional as well...
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and I've read electricity charges negate any potential earnings.
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The main thing with any crypto"currency" is that you have to get in early and get in fast. it's faster to get "coins" (or whatever their units are called) early on. As more people jump on board, it takes longer and longer to "mine" coins, and the value shoots up. At which point, people who bought into it earlier will cash out, allowing the value to fall a bit. And seeing the downward spike in price, speculators will jump on board, then the price will go up as that attracts more "miners"; the value goes up, some of them sell- the chain repeats.
by all accounts they are a speculative ponzi scheme. One thing about them that annoys me is that so often when I criticize them I am told I am simply "jealous" that I didn't get in early. The reason I didn't "get in early" is because I don't think it is ethical. If you cash out with thousands of dollars in profit, that's thousands of dollars that some other person either already lost, or is going to lose at some point, and it's just as likely that you can become one of those people for whom their "investment" was a wash. If you want your money to work for you you use an investment that gives stable returns, you don't go to a Casino.
I'm not really saying that the people who mine it are unethical or immoral, just that- well, I don't like the implications. Just Knaves exploiting Fools as usual, and I'd prefer to be neither to be honest.
At this point the draw is so large that you've got malware and website scripts and even apps that specifically seek to use your processor time to mine cryptocurrency for them.
The irony about the whole thing is that the entire reason that they never seem to be usable as a currency is because of their wildly fluctuating market value which is a direct result of there not being any sort of regulation, even though one of the popular bullet points about them is that they are unregulated and uncentralized. It's almost as if currency systems are centralized for a reason.
Basically, they are something of a modern version of Tulip Mania (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania). Apparently I'm not the only one to make this connection- behold, TulipCoin (https://tulipcoins.github.io/)
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When bitcoin first came out, I avoided it like the plague myself due to assumptions and i didnt bother looking into what it was. I figured it had to be illegal and i wanted no part of an illegal project. Making money out of thin air by running your computer through complex mathematics to me just seemed extremely strange. Additionally nothing is free and how could running your computer to mine work to make money. Its insane that the bitcoins have gone to crazy amounts of money each of which its determined to be worth almost $7000 each now.
Looking further into the miner apps on google play, I noticed many have advertising and claim to be miners. Many of them look like watching ads will pay out a small fraction of a penny to you for each ad and others pay out 250 satoshis if you install an app and leave it running on device for at least 3 days. So they dont mine trying to hunt for bit coins, instead they claim to be miners but its advertisers paying a small fraction of a penny on each advertisement to you in fractions of a bit coin as satoshi's
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The best mining story i saw recently was about the Russian scientists usung the super computer at a nuke plant to mine...
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WOW ... Good thing they got caught to stop this before another Chernobyl ::)
Only story I heard of recently was a MIT student using the colleges electric bill to earn money mining as seen here: https://qz.com/1160667/the-secret-lives-of-students-who-mine-cryptocurrency-in-their-dorm-rooms/
I suppose money can be made if someone is laundering money through electrons to raise an electric bill for someone else and get money out the other end in cryptocurrency. ::)
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Full Story... (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43003740)
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WOW ... Good thing they got caught to stop this before another Chernobyl ::)
Uh... I don't understand the association...
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Uh... I don't understand the association...
Chernobyl was an accidental mishap... and workers using computers that are important for safe nuke power plant operation .... if they swamp critical systems with crunching of numbers thinking it wont hurt anything, those systems might not be able to safely keep the plant operating when overburdened by the crypto currency crunching. ::)
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The story is about scientists who worked in a top-secret nuclear warhead facility, not a nuclear power plant. I would expect the supercomputer would be being used for more "mundane" scientific purposes such as for simulations and manufacturing.
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Then it's my bad for stating it was a nuclear reactor facility...
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Course that being said i think an accident at the latter would kinda be worse than the former.
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Ok .... ;D That would be safer then. The computers there should be idle for the most part and a memory overflow, crash, or anything like that wouldnt cause a launch. :P