Comment Re:Electroplating in college dorms (Score 1) 690
Now I really want to know how many C-64s, Apple ][s, Osbourne's, or other contemporary machines available to students we would have needed to have a 95% chance of mining a coin before the semester was out. That's assuming that crypto currency existed in 1987, which it didn't. I suspect we would have overloaded the breaker panel and not have had much of a chance. These machines struggled to render one crappy low-res image of the Mandlebrot set.
A more plausible technique back then would have been to steal cycles from an academic computer. I don't know what they had in the 80s, but when I returned to school after dropping out there was an RS6000 and a Sun cluster to which we had access, and possibly more that we could have found and compromised. Not sure how much computing power could have come from pooled student accounts. It might have been more plausible; but the ability to run unattended jobs was often restricted. Computing privileges at a university generally aren't worth risking for such nonsense...