A student at London’s Imperial College has been banned from use of all computing facilities after using his university’s computers to mine 30,000 ‘Dogecoin’.
The anonymous student had been accessing Imperial College’s computer lab at night and leaving machines to run, using their core-power and resources in an online currency mining operation.
The student told online forum Coindesk, “It seems they don’t have anything set up to bring attention to the fact I’m maxing out the CPUs, which is nice.”
The joke-alternative currency derived from the ‘Doge’ internet meme has also been the source of a similar incident at Harvard University in February.
An Ivy League student was permanently banned from access to all of Harvard’s research computing facilities after similarly using them to mine Dogecoin.
Harvard’s prestigious supercomputing system had been scheduled by the student to be used for the mining operation, and was reported to university administrators after unusual activity was discovered.
An internal e-mail from the institution, which was posted on Reddit reads, “Any activities using our shared resources for any non-scientific purpose that results or does not actually result in personal gain are also clearly and explicitly denied.”
Harvard University, upon banning the student from all research facilities have said the student’s actions were “strictly prohibited for fairly obvious reasons”.
An article in The Guardian earlier this year revealed how a group of supporters raised $250,000 in Dogecoin, in order to help the Jamaican bobsleigh team to enter the Sochi Winter Olympics.
Also, a burger stand in East-London’s Brick Lane has become one of the first places in Britain to accept the Dogecoin virtual currency.
The increasing popularity for cryptocurrencies has led to a demand for computer systems to engage in mining operations to bring Dogecoin into existence.
