This is just at the beginning of the story to be fair. Later on he is mining in his living place and also writes about the electrity cost needing to be covered by the mining revenue.
The universities also very quickly banned crypto mining in dormitories. People still did it secretly, but it was very easy to get caught. There would have been no way to have any sizeable operations in a dorm.
A friend and I managed to run a PS3 cluster mining bitcoins in one of the labs on campus for pretty much the entire 2009 academic year. But I think that was before mining rigs became much of a nuisance.
The original bitcoin software ran on Windows if I'm not mistaken, so I don't know about "mostly Linux users".
Maybe it was different in the US. In Europe I get the impression the FOSS community is predominantly left-leaning. My local Debian community certainly is, and they're anti-cryptocurrency (like myself).
Slashdot was also quite skewed against bitcoin, and that was a pretty international geek readership.
The first Bitcoin difficulty adjustment happened on Dec 30 2009. Which means that for entirety of year 2009 there was on average just one computer mining Bitcoins.
Not really a stretch. I have a similar story that I can attribute to 2009/2010 (attempting to mine on the person's computer I was living with at the time)
Was just sharing my experience with the topic really. Tbh, building a PS3 supercomputer was one of the most educational experiences I had during my time at university. If they didn’t have an 11 figure endowment I might almost feel bad about it.
Edit: Also, I absolutely didn’t get rich from this if that’s what you’re concerned about for some reason. We cashed out after an early price spike, pocketing several thousand dollars each, which with both considered to be a major windfall.
Considering the typical behavior of about 90% or more of all major tech companies that many people on this site work for or contract to, it's laughable that you'd snark at someone talking about a minor pseudo-theft of electricity form a dorm room several years ago. Hell, much of the shit being thrown by commentators on this site on cryptominers, who often use renewable energy sources for their mining, is itself laughable considering how much electricity and resources the mega tech corps they work for burn all the time. You could argue that said companies do so for "better" reasons, but that's debatable and a separate matter.
That's an interesting statement. Are there still people on here who define hacker as a bad thing, instead of someone who wants to take things apart to see how they work?
Is tech still counter culture now that it pervades every place in society? Is it still okay to completely shirk the law now that many tech companies, for all intents and purposes, write the laws?
> Is tech still counter culture now that it pervades every place in society?
Tech is not counter culture (and has in my personal observation never really been). Hacker culture, on the other hand, was counterculture from beginning on and still mostly is.
The distinction between legal and illegal hacking it relatively recent.
Stealing small amounts of money or value goes way back.
And Hacker News is run by YCombinator, which has an application form that asks applications to explain a time when they cheated ("hacked") a system for personal advantage.
