Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Using Spare Cycles in Data Centers to Mine Bitcoin Does not pay

Can data centers tap unused server capacity to mine for Bitcoins? The question occurred to the team at the online backup service iDrive, which performs most of its customer backup jobs overnight, leaving its 3,000 quad-core servers idle for much of the day. So the company ran a test with 600 servers to see whether Bitcoin mining could become a secondary revenue stream.

The result: running Bitcoin mining software on those 600 quad-core servers for a year would earn about 0.43 Bitcoin, worth a total return of about $275.08 at current prices on major Bitcoin exchanges.

“Its a waste of time, so any other company thinking about mining with their infrastructure, learn from us,” said iDrive’s Matthew Harvey. “Don’t do it. You need custom machines to effectively mine bitcoins and generate a real ROI.”

The iDrive test-drive reinforced a common theme on Bitcoin mining forums: To earn money by mining, you need to invest in highly-customized computers using ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) to crunch data for creating and tracking bitcoins.

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