Cryptomining groups fight fiercely for cloud resources

Cryptocurrency mining groups that typically have targeted on-premises servers are now competing fiercely for servers in the cloud. In a report this week, Trend Micro revealed that, while the seemingly infinite scalability of the cloud makes it attractive for cryptomining, the resources are still relatively limited – which …

[Little Mouse]

Genuine question:

If the crypto-currency bubble were to burst overnight, who in the "real" world, apart from criminals and the gullible, would suffer?

I imagine there must be a few pension & investment funds out there that include crypto as part of their portfolio, but hopefully none that depend on it.

[b0llchit]

The criminals have little investment and may not suffer at all from a bubble crash. The small people, those blinded by the promises, are them who will be stripped of their valuables because they invested their real money in exchange for virtual promises. Sure, maybe some investors may have some losses too, but they are normally secured through other posts elsewhere.

[Ian Johnston]

The small people, those blinded by the promises, are them who will be stripped of their valuables because they invested their real money in exchange for virtual promises.

But let's face it, they're going to lose it all anyway when in due course the exchange where they keep their cryptocurrency is "hacked" and everything there is "stolen". It's just a matter of when.

[Pascal Monett]

Thieves knifing thieves

Obviously there will be consequences when an army of miscreants have refined their techniques and turn back to attack on-prem servers, but I'm always happy when criminals take out each other.

It saves work for the police.

[Natalie Gritpants Jr]

It's core wars all over again.

[Graeme5]

Crypto is a waste of power

The idea that securing something with a block chain secured by mining which equals CPU power, which equals electricity is such an environmental nightmare.

It's literally a race to burn as much electrical power as possible for cash. I can't believe Greenpeace or similar are not protesting every crypto currency constantly.

It would be nice to have some electronic cash that could be trusted and traded freely but it's not worth the energy input of this system.

[Flip]

Re: Crypto is a waste of power

Nobody talks about CloudCoin. I don't know if they are a legitimate cryptocurrency alternative, but there is no blockchain (therefore no mining). There was a lot of noise when they first started up five or so years ago, but since then I never see them mentioned. Probably another scam, I suppose.

[random119327]

Re: Crypto is a waste of power

crypto use much less twh than the banking system (not included the power for all their trading tools)

The web itself is a waste of power, loading megabytes per pages when they could offer the exact similar content for few kilobytes, Greenpeace should definitively protesting against this.

[DS999]

Couldn't cloud companies detect this?

If you have servers pegged at 100% CPU for longer than a day when that was previously never the case, alert the customer as to the change in usage.

Better yet, if they could detect patterns in resource usage that match mining for common coins, they could shut it down. I can't imagine anyone would deliberately pay for cloud resources for mining, so shutting it off as a matter of course isn't likely to upset anyone.

[Michael Hoffmann]

Criminals moving to NFTs?

In the last few weeks I've dived down the rabbit hole that is NFTs, the other new blockchain darling.

No, not to invest, hell no! But reading up just what a scam it is for the truly brain-damaged taken by the completely unscrupulous and the lowest dregs of humanity known as "influencers".

I would have thought it would become far more interesting for criminals to jump into: far fewer resources required, all you apparently need is an Andy Warholified cartoon of a chimp. Or something along those lines. Some idiotic cult phrases (to the moon! line goes up!) and you have the gullible beating down your door without having to do much of anything. No GPU farms, no malware battles in the cloud. Pull off something like Earth 2 and you even managed to invent something that currently can't even be categorised as quite a Ponzi not a MLM scheme, total legal greyzone.