Wiki Bitcoin Miners

We tried mining bitcoins… Here’s what happened…

Ever considered mining bitcoins? Well, as a business with 3, 000 servers, IDrive decided to look into the idea to see if bitcoin mining was an option during non-peak times, a possible untapped revenue stream. We learned some valuable bit(coin)s of information; here’s what happened…

Most of our users backup their files at night, so our non-peak times are during the day (between 3am and 4pm). During this time, there is unused server capacity that can be used for other operations. Utilizing independent resources (since bitcoining is decentralized) such as the source code on Github, forums on Bitcoin Wiki, bitcoin.org, and the bitcoin simulator on coinplorer.com, a dedicated team of our best engineers spent a week testing the possibility and found that using our servers to mine bitcoins would affect our business model in four main areas:

1) Cost

Although IDrive owns 3, 000 servers, we used 600 (each with a quad core processor operating at 2.8 GHz) for our simulated tests. Our study projected a year of mining at 100% processing power 24/7 and the assumption that the difficulty of mining (the calculating of hashes) would increase linearly. (We also assumed that there would be no additional charge for operating our servers consistently at full power for an entire year.*) Since mining bitcoins is designed to take a certain amount of time to ensure legitimacy, as more people get involved and more power is added, the cryptography is made more complex to slow down the process. Therefore, as time progresses, more power will be needed to mine (and, thus, more airflow for cooling is also necessary). As a result, it will take more energy to mine fewer bitcoins, with the energy needed consistently increasing.