Mark was a sophomore at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when he began mining cryptocurrencies more or less by accident.
In November 2016, he stumbled on NiceHash, an online marketplace for individuals to mine cryptocurrency for willing buyers. His desktop computer, boosted with a graphics card, was enough to get started. Thinking he might make some money, Mark, who asked not to use his last name, downloaded the platform’s mining software and began mining for random buyers in exchange for payments in bitcoin. Within a few weeks, he had earned back the $120 cost of his graphics card, as well as enough to buy another for $200.
From using NiceHash, he switched to mining ether, then the most popular bitcoin alternative. To increase his computational power, he scrounged up several unwanted desktop computers from a professor who “seemed to think that they were awful and totally trash.” When equipped with the right graphics cards, the “trash” computers worked fine.
Each time Mark mined enough ether to cover the cost, he bought a new graphics card, trading leftover currency into bitcoin for safekeeping. By March 2017, he was running seven computers, mining ether around the clock from his dorm room. By September his profits totaled one bitcoin—worth roughly $4,500 at the time. Now, four months later, after bitcoin’s wild run and the diversification of his cryptocoin portfolio, Mark estimates he has $20,000 in digital cash. “It just kind of blew up,” he says.
Mark
Exploiting a crucial competitive advantage and motivated by profit and a desire to learn the technology, students around the world are launching cryptocurrency mining operations right from their dorm rooms. In a typical mining operation, electricity consumption accounts for the highest fraction of operational costs, which is why the largest bitcoin mines are based in China. But within Mark’s dorm room, MIT foots the bill. That gives him and other student miners the ability to earn higher profit margins than most other individual miners.
In the months since meeting Mark, I’ve interviewed seven other miners from the US, Canada, and Singapore who ran or currently run dorm room cryptomining operations, and I’ve learned of many more who do the same. Initially, almost every student began mining because it was fun, cost-free, and even profitable. As their operations grew, so did their interest in cryptocurrency and in blockchain, the underlying technology. Mining, in other words, was an unexpected gateway into discovering a technology that many predict will dramatically transform our lives.
While it’s impossible to estimate how many dorm room cryptominers exist globally, it’s likely their numbers are growing as cryptocurrency values continue to balloon. Once they graduate, these students are poised to play a critical role in shaping the next technology revolution.
A dorm room operation
Years before meeting Mark, when I was a junior at MIT, I had heard rumors of my peers mining bitcoin. After its value exploded, and along with it, the necessary computational and electrical power to mine it, I assumed that dorm room mining was no longer viable. What I hadn’t considered was the option of mining alternate cryptocurrencies, including ethereum, which can and do thrive as small-scale operations.
When mining for cryptocurrency, computational power, along with low power costs, is king. Miners around the world compete to solve math problems for a chance to earn digital coins. The more computational power you have, the greater your chances of getting returns.
The more computational power you have, the greater your chances of getting returns.
To profitably mine bitcoin today, you need an application-specific integrated circuit, or ASIC—specialized hardware designed for bitcoin-mining efficiency. An ASIC can have 100,000 times more computational power than a standard desktop computer equipped with a few graphics cards. But ASICs are expensive—the most productive ones easily cost several thousands of dollars—and they suck power. If bitcoin prices aren’t high enough to earn more revenue than the cost of electricity, the pricey hardware cannot be repurposed for any other function.
In contrast, alternate currencies like ethereum are “ASIC-resistant,” because ASICS designed to mine ether don’t exist. That means ether can be profitably mined with just a personal computer. Rather than rely solely on a computer’s core processor (colloquially called a “CPU”), however, miners pair it with graphics cards (“GPUs”) to increase the available computational power. Whereas CPUs are designed to solve one problem at a time, GPUs are designed to simultaneously solve hundreds. The latter dramatically raises the chances of getting coins.
Mark
Most of the dorm room miners I spoke to mined alternative currencies with personal computers and graphics cards. Some used their desktops, while others built their own computers. A few of them even used their laptops. Pretty much everyone already had graphics cards for gaming or other purposes before realizing that they met the hardware requirements for mining.
“It just so happened that at the time I was reading up on mining, I was building a personal computer for purposes of video editing…some AI stuff, and whatever I throw at it,” says Arjun Singh Brar, a recent graduate of Singapore University of Technology and Design. With access to his dorm’s free electricity, he thought, “Why don’t I just give [mining] a try.”
Free electricity and massive amounts of heat
By Mark’s estimation, four of the other 35 residents on his floor also have homegrown rigs. Unlike his setup, most just use a single desktop with one or two graphics cards.
None of them really know what MIT’s policy is on their profit-generating activities, so they take precautions to avoid getting caught. “I have a lot of experience with exactly what outlets in my room can pull what amounts of current before I trip the breaker,” Mark says. He knows it trips if he ever overclocks any one of his computers by running its CPU at a faster speed than it was designed for. That causes his entire operation to shut down, which could draw the scrutiny of the university’s facilities department. (MIT did not respond to request for comment.)
“All chocolate I accidentally leave here melts, but it’s not horribly uncomfortable.”
So far, everyone on Mark’s floor has flown under the radar. MIT monitors electricity use by building rather than by individual, and the miners almost certainly don’t pull enough power to make their dorm’s electricity use look anomalous. All of the other miners I spoke to had similar experiences; their universities raised no objections—either out of ignorance or apathy. 1 (SUTD and Stanford did not respond to requests for comment. Babson College said it didn’t “have anything to add on this subject.”)
1
On the question of whether mining cryptocurrency for profit should be allowed in dorm rooms, Andrew Sellars, the director of Boston University’s Technology & Cyberlaw Clinic, says he “would venture to guess most universities, if not all universities, have not thought about this question at all or perhaps only very generally.” There are technically no legal ramifications for dorm room mining, he says. Most universities have a non-solicitation policy that prevents students from doing business out of their dorms, which could be stretched to apply to this scenario, but Sellars doesn’t think universities have a strong incentive to crackdown. “Dorm rooms are kind of a funny space,” he says. Even though universities own them and are in charge of their students’ health and safety, they must also afford their students a degree of autonomy as arbiters of the bridge from childhood to adulthood.
Mark figures the university owes him, anyway. “The only thing that I’m concerned about is if somebody at MIT comes after me for unnecessarily using their electricity, which I think is kind of silly considering how much it costs 2 to go here,” he says. James Spann, a sophomore at the Rochester Institute of Technology who also mines crypto, echoed Mark’s reasoning: “The electricity and internet are part of the tuition.”
2
The estimated cost of attendance for undergraduates at MIT is $67,430 for the 2017-2018 school year.
What dorm miners don’t pay for in electricity, they pay for in discomfort. Even without the radiator running in the middle of a Boston winter, the temperature in Mark’s room is well above desirable. His rig is “essentially a 2,000-watt heater running at all times,” Mark says. “All chocolate I accidentally leave here melts, but it’s not horribly uncomfortable.” This is even after he moved his two most efficient mining rigs to his girlfriend’s room three floors below because the heat in the summer was unbearable.
Other miners described how they handled the massive amounts of heat—and what their significant others and roommates put up with. Rahul, a Stanford class of 2015 electrical engineer, drew his girlfriend’s ire for his rig. “It was very loud and blew a lot of hot air. My girlfriend was very upset that it had to be on at night,” he laughs.
Nicholas Abouzeid
When Nicholas Abouzeid, a senior at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, began mining from home in high school, he ran the software off his Macbook Pro and kept his bedroom window open to regulate his laptop’s temperature. “It would get to 35 degrees in my room, and I was shivering in bed, but my computer was very happy,” he says. A few months before leaving for college, when he built his own computer to mine crypto more efficiently, he surrounded it with fans to disperse the heat.
Patrick Cines, a recent college graduate who mined in his dorm room at Penn State University in State College, Pennsylvania, was particularly innovative. To regulate his room’s temperature in the August heat without air conditioning, he hacked together a ventilation solution out of Home Depot dryer tubes. “The ones that people usually connect to their dryers in their houses to put out all the heat,” he explains.
Patrick Cines
Fast gains and faster losses
In the fast-paced, unregulated world of crypto, a fortune gained one day can be quickly lost the next, not just because of the market’s high volatility. Lack of regulation increases susceptibility to fraud and security breaches.
On Dec. 6 last year, for example, hackers penetrated NiceHash, the platform that introduced Mark to mining, and whisked away 4,736.42 bitcoin, worth more than $60 million based on the day-of price. Mark had returned to NiceHash after mining ether, but fortunately only lost roughly $300 of unpaid bitcoin. He immediately switched to using a different cryptomining marketplace. NiceHash froze its operations for two weeks.
“I got burned.”
While Mark’s encounter with bad actors left him relatively unscathed, Rahul, the Stanford graduate, suffered a much greater loss. In December, 2013, he spent a couple thousand dollars on an ASIC to mine bitcoin. Within the first three months, he mined what was at the time worth $10,000, he says. (According to CoinDesk, the price of bitcoin during that time averaged around $800.) Confident that the price would rise, he purchased another $10,000 of bitcoin with his own money and placed all of his holdings on Mt. Gox, then the largest and most trusted bitcoin exchange in the world.
In February of 2014, Mt. Gox got hacked and lost 740,000 bitcoins. The Japanese exchange declared bankruptcy and Rahul lost every penny. Despite joining the subsequent class action lawsuit, he told me he still hasn’t seen any of his investment returned.
“Our BTC, plus the additional investments we made, would have been worth well over six figures at today’s prices,” he says. “I got burned.”
Ahead of the curve
Though dorm room mining may seem trivial, it’s creating a new generation of cryptocurrency experts. Many miners say their experiences taught them crucial lessons about the technology, and some have already substantially profited as well.
Abouzeid at Babson, for example, was introduced to crypto in December 2013 while he was still a junior in high school. His friend showed him the lighthearted, meme-obsessed subreddit for dogecoin, a new bitcoin alternative, named after the viral doge meme. “I was like, ‘Oh this is fun and kind of silly. I’ll buy in,'” he says.
He began dabbling with mining doge (the dogecoin unit of currency) on his Macbook Pro. In January 2014, the subreddit pooled together $30,000, or 26.5 million doge, to send the Jamaican bobsled team to the Sochi Winter Olympics. Two months later, it pooled together $55,000, over 100 million doge, to sponsor a driver in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race. Both stunts made Abouzeid realize the power of crypto.
“Now I can look back and go, ‘Wow look, I know more about bitcoin than most people!'”
Invigorated, he dug into understanding bitcoin and built his first specialized mining computer at home. “It ran for three months until my mother got our electricity bill,” he says. Once he arrived at Babson, the university’s free electricity gave him unfettered freedom to dive deep into the crypto world.
“I don’t know if I could justify my interest in it initially,” he says. “Of course now I can look back and go, ‘Wow look, I know more about bitcoin than most people! This is totally a good investment.’ But at first it was just fun.” The experience has inspired him to work in the industry in the future.
Akash Nath, a class of 2016 Boston University graduate, began a bitcoin derivatives trading platform called Alt-Options with a few other classmates several months after he began mining in his dorm room as a sophomore. He and the other founders sold the company for an undisclosed amount in April 2016, earning a neat return before even graduating from college. ”It worked out pretty nicely,” he says.
Now 23, Nath runs a company unrelated to crypto, but maintains his network in the crypto and blockchain community. If he returns to the crypto world, he plans to educate new users. There are “very few clear resources to properly direct and educate newcomers,” he says.
An impending revolution
No one yet fully understands how cryptocurrencies will change how we transact business with one another, but many experts predict they will spark a revolution. That thinking was reflected in 2017 when bitcoin’s price rose 1,000%, yet still fell short of the top 10 cryptocurrency gainers of the year; when Estonia announced that it would pursue plans to launch a crypto-token, making it the first country to do so; and when major Japanese and South Korean banks began trialing blockchain-based payments (paywall).
“I fundamentally believe that blockchain technologies are going to improve the world,” says Abouzeid. “I don’t know when, I don’t know how. I don’t know if it’s going to be bitcoin or ethereum or whatever coin is coming up today or tomorrow, but I enjoy it and it’s fun.
“It’s fun to be part of the ride.”