A Major Part of Cryptocurrency Mining Happens in College Campuses
A very surprising report came to light when Austin McBride from CISCO revealed about it in the RSA seminar which happened in San Francisco. They reported that about 22% of cryptocurrency mining traffic can be seen coming from the campuses of the universities. It was even more surprising to know that in this, about 62% of traffic flow is from the United States. In the last couple of years, the cryptocurrency space was being dominated by miners from Asia.
It seems like the universities are not only making graduates, but they are creating a lot of cryptocurrency miners too. There is a product offered by CISCO known as Umbrella that gathers information like where the mining traffic is coming from. Researches from Cisco have been keeping a track of where the digital currency mining. The tracking of mining is taking place throughout the industry verticals noticing that college campuses are in the second position as the largest miner of cryptocurrencies.
Umbrella keeps track of all the cryptocurrency traffic that is moving inwards and outwards. It keeps track of suspicious digital currency traffic at places where it is forbidden. They found that energy and utility firms and university campuses were on the top list while analysing the digital currency traffic. Presently about 180 million Domain Name Server request is being processed by Umbrella every day.
It is believed that many students are possibly generating their own rig for mining Bitcoin from their dorms because the traffic is somewhat distributed and are not mining through cooperative efforts. In the RSA conference, McBride said, “You leave running in your dorm room for four years, you walk out of college with a big chunk of change.” He further said that by running their own rig in their dorms or library they need not worry about the costs that will eat their mining profits.
This way, they will have a 100% profit in digital currency as there are no other expenses. Even though the digital currency mining is “quite distributed,” all the mining is not done by the students, there are some hackers also involved who with the help of malware are contaminating vulnerable systems. They are using malware which privately is making use of the hardware and mining cryptocurrency.
The cost for mining a lot of coins is very high currently since it costs the miner a lot for internet and electricity than making profits by mining says, McBride. Further, he said that if you don’t have to worry about these costs, then you are in the right place to make profits by using the university’s money.
