The second largest cryptocurrency miners among the various industries are college campuses. This is based on information published on March 5 in the PCMag by tech conglomerate Cisco. In fact, Cisco’s security researchers have been monitoring cryptocurrency mining operations across many different industry verticals. Cisco used its security product known as Umbrella in order to track the network connections of clients including their crypto mining activities.

Free Electricity means Pure Profit

According to Cisco researcher Austin McBride, mining difficult is very high at the moment for a lot of coins. This means that you will be spending more on electricity and internet compared to what you can earn from mining cryptocurrency. However, if the university is the one paying for the electricity and the internet, then you’re in for a huge profit.

Based on Cisco’s ranking, utilities and college campuses are closely followed by the media industry as well as the healthcare sector. These had six and seven percent ratings respectively. The four, three, and two percent records show cryptocurrency mining in three familiar sectors: the local government, the manufacturing industry, and the financial services sector.

Colleges Second to Industry

According to the Cisco report, university campuses were the second biggest miners with it comes to the digital currency. Universities made up 22% of all the industry verticals but only came second to the utilities and energy sector. This sector ranked first at 34%. This means that if a student leaves the mining rig in his dormitory room for the next four years, he can expect a huge chunk of money by the time he walks out of college.

However, Stanford University was the first to detect these mining activities in 2018, so it emphasized that school resources should not be taken advantage of for personal financial gain. It warned that cryptocurrency mining could compromise systems of campus power as well as the university’s computing equipment.

