Guy spends $150,000 worth of supercomputer time [taxpayer money] to find $10,000 worth of bitcoin [for himself]. http://www.cio.com/article/753803/U...ining_Bitcoin_Using_University_Supercomputers
What does this mean exactly: "Took up"??? So he hi-jacked these computers so they couldn't do their primary function and it costs NFS $150,000? For six months??? Sounds like an estimated loss to me... if the computers were hi-jacked for 6 months then obviously they were not doing anything extremely critical, otherwise they would have caught him earlier. I thought is was better to use one super computer with 10 video cards than a network of computers? Sounds like he thought it would be easier to do the computations anonymously via remote and then get $10,000 without anyone knowing.
Yeah, the way I understand it is that the problem is not amenable to parallel processing; i.e. you can't solve different parts of the problem at the same time and therefore use more processors to mine a single bitcoin more rapidly. It is single-threaded and so the processor has to run through solving the equation from start to finish. The only way running multiple processors helps out is if you have many very very fast processors, because then you can mine multiple bitcoin simultaneously.
