An anonymous student at Imperial College London has made 30,000 dogecoin by surreptitiously setting the university computers to work each night

This article is more than 6 years old

This article is more than 6 years old

A student at London’s Imperial College has been using his university’s computers to mine Dogecoin, the meme-based cryptocurrency.

According to the bitcoin news site Coindesk, the anonymous student has been accessing Imperial’s computer lab every evening and setting the computers to work, using their processing power to run the algorithms that bring new Dogecoins into existence.

“I’ve not had a single issue yet,” he told Coindesk’s Kadhim Shubber, “so I’ve kept scaling up! It seems they don’t have anything set up to bring attention to the fact I’m maxing out the CPUs, which is nice.”

The student has reportedly made 30,000 Dogecoin in the mining operations so far, worth around £20.

Mining any cryptocurrency is a computationally expensive process, which not only renders the device unusable for other reasons but can rack up electricity bills and put computers at risk of overheating. For that reason many establishments ban the use of shared computers to mine the currency.

The problems at Imperial College follow Harvard University, where a student was disciplined in February for mining Dogecoin using the university’s Odyssey supercomputer.

The university permanently blocked the individual in question from all research computing facilities, saying their actions were “strictly prohibited for fairly obvious reasons”.



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