The Cryptocurrency Mining Thread: just flip your old cards on eBay

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cryptocurrency Mining Thread: just flip your old cards on eBay

Dren: Jan 5, 2001; Pillbug

Paul MaudDib posted:

Consider the following: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1742287615000559

NVIDIA's drivers are a little better about not allowing super dumb poo poo but overall GPUs are designed around a "high performance computation" model. For example on non-ECC NVIDIA GPUs, hardware ties into the host in kernel mode for performance, memory is not zero'd between reallocation between programs, etc. And yes, in general it's like working on a microcontroller sometimes, boundaries and fault conditions that you expect in CPU world may or may not exist. This isn't a model built around an assumption of possible bad actors, it's close to the metal by design.

Would you really notice an OpenCL/CUDA thread quietly cryptolockering your files in the background, and stopping when it sees logging/tracing/mouse movement/etc? Most people aren't locked down that far.

What do you think of running the miner on a liveusb with no kernel drivers for pata, sata, and scsi controllers? I should probably vlan it too like you suggest.

# ¿ Jun 21, 2017 16:28

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 15:27

Dren: Jan 5, 2001; Pillbug

Paul MaudDib posted:

Does NiceHash for Linux even exist? My beef is specifically with the "program that downloads arbitrary code from the internet and runs it on your GPU" part, I think the risk of the actual official Github repositories being trojans is extremely low. And based on what people are saying about "trying a new version of Nicehash with better optimizations" I might have misunderstood how NiceHash works (although it still strikes me as a quasi-shady program overall). I am just relatively paranoid about this and would prefer to run relatively trusted builds from source where possible rather than "Free Internet Money Program, Just Run Me!". I lived through the early days of the internet and don't trust that poo poo.

Craptacular's right though, the real solution here is having backups of things you care about, but just like using pirated games from the internet, cryptomining with NiceHash strikes me as a risky activity where you should be double-sure that your backups are all in order.

I actually played with this the other night and ESXi won't let me pass my NVIDIA GPU through (this is apparently feature-locked to Quadros). I had VT-d enabled and some devices showed up as passable, including even the audio controllers on the GPUs, but not the GPUs themselves. It might work with AMD, and there was also a suggestion that you could use KVM (another hypervisor) with a particular flag which nullified the check NVIDIA was doing to be sure you aren't doing passthrough on non-Quadros.

I've been wanting to try this anyway to see if I could run my whole system in hypervisor so I could dual-boot and run Linux at the same time. In theory you shouldn't see any performance hit from passing the GPU through, VT-d gives direct access to the PCIe devices.

To jump back to Dren's post, running a miner that you compiled yourself from source (takes literally 5 minutes), inside a VLAN segment to keep it away from the rest of your network, with no local access to your drives/network access to shares/etc, sufficiently satisfies my paranoia. In theory running inside a hypervisor makes some of those conditions easier to fulfill since you're not talking about unplugging drives or your gaming PC being unable to access your fileserver, etc. You just wouldn't pass them through to that particular VM.

You don't really need to boot from USB, as long as your system can't touch anything else then the worst-case scenario is you need to re-image. But if you wanted to gild the lily a bit you could make a custom loopback image that has all your stuff installed, and then either boot that from USB (mounted RO) or PXE boot. Then your base system image would truly be immutable. Again with the VLAN thing you could easily set up a network partition where all this stuff could live and potentially be automatically quarantined based on some kind of IP/mac address filter. But if you're putting this much thought into it then you're way beyond just "run the miner directly instead of through NiceHash".

I've been needing to play with PXE too, because I have an old Thinkpad that's too old to understand how to boot from USB, and the CD drive isn't doing too hot, but it does understand how to PXE boot. PXE basically looks in a specific place for a TFTP server (I want to say on the DHCP host) so you need to do some rearranging from the typical router config but again, VLANs might come in handy so your private network can work like normal and you have separate DHCP/TFTP running for the guest VLAN segment served from a VM or something.

NiceHash for Linux doesn't seem to exist. I did some really cursory googling and thought that it did. My reason for wanting Nicehash is that it's doing the automatic switching from coin to coin to maximize profitability. I guess I could just mine eth or whatever and skip Nicehash, I don't think your concerns are really that far fetched considering the scammy and terrible reputation of everything crypto. Especially since if you're running Nicehash you're running all sorts of miners.

I haven't set up VT-D with pci-e passthrough, last I looked it seemed like kind of a pain in the rear end. My guess is that it doesn't fully address the security concerns but I don't know the architecture well enough to say.

# ¿ Jun 21, 2017 20:41

Dren: Jan 5, 2001; Pillbug

SamDabbers posted:

The whole idea behind VT-d/IOMMU is to enforce access control on DMAs between a VM's memory and PCIe devices. The PCI topology on your motherboard is divided into groups, and devices within the same group share the same partitioned memory space, so they (and their assigned VM) can read/write each others' memory, while devices in a different group cannot. Good implementations of VT-d put each physical PCIe slot, and sometimes on-board components like NICs, into separate groups so that each device can be individually assigned to a different VM while still maintaining the isolation.

Some cards, like 10G NICs and non-gaming GPUs, support SR-IOV, which is an implementation of access control on the card itself, so you can arbitrarily partition the card's resources (NIC queues, execution units, memory, etc) and assign each partition to a separate VM.

Short answer: properly implemented it should mitigate concerns about malicious GPU code affecting things outside of a VM.

that is cool, thanks

# ¿ Jun 21, 2017 21:16

Dren: Jan 5, 2001; Pillbug

The IRS issued guidance on crytpocurrency back in 2014. Check out IRS notice 2014-21 and please file your taxes correctly. https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/n-14-21.pdf

especially relevant bit:

quote:

Q-8: Does a taxpayer who �mines� virtual currency (for example, uses computer
resources to validate Bitcoin transactions and maintain the public Bitcoin
transaction ledger) realize gross income upon receipt of the virtual currency
resulting from those activities?
A-8: Yes, when a taxpayer successfully �mines� virtual currency, the fair market value
of the virtual currency as of the date of receipt is includible in gross income. See
Publication 525, Taxable and Nontaxable Income, for more information on taxable
income.

# ¿ Jun 22, 2017 01:58

Dren: Jan 5, 2001; Pillbug

Rastor posted:

And I assume that's why you mine and sell instead of mine and hold

it's mostly because of this

https://twitter.com/StockTwits/status/877621142734778368

# ¿ Jun 22, 2017 03:36

Dren: Jan 5, 2001; Pillbug

shrike82 posted:

dumb question but if I try to buy a game on steam with bitcoin, it talks about supplementing the base cost with an additional fee (tip?), and I understand that upping the fee makes the transaction go thru faster? how the heck does that work

It is the transaction fee and since bitcoin is decentralized there is no way to know for sure how high it needs to be to get your transaction to go through. This website gives you an estimate https://bitcoinfees.21.co

# ¿ Jun 24, 2017 06:13

Dren: Jan 5, 2001; Pillbug

shrike82 posted:

Thanks for that. Based on "For the median transaction size of 226 bytes, this results in a fee of 81,360 satoshis", am I right in saying that I'd need to "tip" 2 bucks and change to get my transaction thru a < 35 minute time window.

lol

Maybe!

# ¿ Jun 24, 2017 06:27

Dren: Jan 5, 2001; Pillbug

quote:

You are going to work your rear end off for the Ethereum man like a real life miner and never even pay off the cards.

Except unlike a real life miner the amount of wealth generated does not scale with the amount of work done. Cryptocoins are beautiful.

# ¿ Jun 24, 2017 14:03

Dren: Jan 5, 2001; Pillbug

Where is the coin that is mined with human blood sacrifices

# ¿ Jul 5, 2017 05:25

Dren: Jan 5, 2001; Pillbug

Risky Bisquick posted:

https://imgur.com/gallery/xbInQ

~~I don't know how to feel about this~~ How can you have kids live like that, my goodness

3 kids... apartment... only 4 chairs around the table... spent at least $30k on bitcoin mining rig instead of a downpayment on a house...

welcome to divorced dad's bitcoin shack

# ¿ Feb 2, 2018 16:42

Dren: Jan 5, 2001; Pillbug

1gnoirents posted:

Thats fine, thats the risk for getting money out of nowhere. Plus Ive already withdrawn my initial investment at this point (I dont get why this isnt common tbh) so "I cant lose"*. To start I put $500 real monies in at the first major dip to ~$11k, kept trading at 1-5% profits then cutting that profit out until I had $250 in the bank, then started leaving the profit in for more money and moved the remaining $250 out once I hit $1000, and now im back up to ~$900 for a total of $1400, though only the initial $500 is truly safe. I took 1-2% losses about a quarter of the time to adjust to the market crashing, and usually id just move from BTC -> ETH or back. And for my own sake to judge how well I'm really doing, I've kept all mining money separate so nothing touches and clouds me.

If I'm able to make money off a dying market, as an idiot, you can too. Unless you cant bear to sell at a small loss, which I understand. Today marks the first time I got a real windfall though. I should have started before when things were way better.

_*cringes*

by safe you of course mean that you have withdrawn the $500 from an exchange into a real bank account

# ¿ Feb 2, 2018 18:24

Dren: Jan 5, 2001; Pillbug

Peachfart posted:

This seems like a shitload of work with high risk and small rewards.

yeah for the amounts he's playing with he might as well go play craps so he can get comped some drinks and not have to deal with a crazy tax return

# ¿ Feb 2, 2018 20:16

Dren: Jan 5, 2001; Pillbug

1gnoirents posted:

I hate to disappoint but even if the price dropped to $0 I've made many thousands since you started this thread lol. But I admit my recklessness, trading thousands to make $20 over 30 seconds over and over, buying and parting out computers to ebay on *financing*, is a funny bitcoin story. But I will argue that even having the most basic checks to the madness protected me fully, and would have likely protected most people. Right now I am on the hook for a stupid Alienware computer but as of last Saturday it can be fully paid off with buttcoin bux if I wanted to.

The real question is do I return it. I have 20 days... I probably should. Somehow this is one of the harder decisions. It will hold value better that most computers however GTC is coming. But a paper launch - at best - in March gives me what, 2 months (?) historically, before what is likely going to be an equivalent mining card releaseto a 1080ti. If it holds at $4/day then its worth keeping but ... I dunno! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I don't know how well you managed your risk but keep in mind that the market could have crashed at any time. Given the magnitude of numbers you mention in this post it sounds like when you outlaid for financed gear or traded thousands to make <1% on that money you exposed yourself to risk that could have swallowed up your profit to date if those investments had gone south.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2018 16:28

Dren: Jan 5, 2001; Pillbug

My point in talking about risk management is that you put an outlay to get your equipment and if the market had turned on you before it did you'd be in the red. There is no predicting the market, you got lucky.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2018 17:48

Dren: Jan 5, 2001; Pillbug

1gnoirents over in the green thread they gave a name for your investment strategy it's "picking up nickels in front of a steamroller"

# ¿ Feb 7, 2018 16:26

Dren: Jan 5, 2001; Pillbug

Why not use Remote Desktop?

# ¿ Feb 8, 2018 03:05

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 15:27

Dren: Jan 5, 2001; Pillbug

Oh I thought he was on a LAN hitting headless boxes

# ¿ Feb 8, 2018 03:46

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cryptocurrency Mining Thread: just flip your old cards on eBay