Favorites

Packet’s Dogecoin April Fools

In one of the more amusing (or less annoying if you’re a curmudgeon) April Fools’ Day gags, Packet put out a blog post saying they were going all doge.  The “launched” official Doge language support, added a new Type D server with “a new RISC architecture called ‘PAW'”, and fitted the blog post announcing the changes in Comic Sans. Since I reached peak internet meme in 2013, this is all right in my wheelhouse. If that’s where they stopped, I’d give it a mild chuckle and maybe a “Like” on Twitter.

But Packet put their servers where their mouth was, and decided to launch some bare metal at mining doge. Now, since Dogecoin is essentially a fork of Litecoin, it has long since been unprofitable to try to mine it with a CPU. That didn’t stop the gag from proceeding. They launched over 1000 servers at the mining project, across a variety of cloud server offerings. The result was mining Dogecoin with just under 7500 CPU cores, at a cost of $405 an hour to run. The bulk of the cores were a mix of low power Atom and higher performing E5 Xeons. The results speak for themselves.

If nothing else, this serves as a helpful PSA: don’t mine cryptocurrency with a CPU. Even when you own a bare metal server business, and can throw a comical amount of cores at a joke currency, it just doesn’t pay.

Packet Commented:

We’ve always loved Doge, for all the reasons that smart, capable people all over the internet do.  However, it wasn’t until we had really built a solid foundation in our business and platform stack that we felt we could really go “all in” with Doge.  In short: we wanted to make sure the Doge experience on Packet was truly immersive and something our investors, customers, spouses, partners, and kindergarten teachers could be proud of.

Read More

About the author

Rich Stroffolino

Rich has been a tech enthusiast since he first used the speech simulator on a Magnavox Odyssey². Current areas of interest include ZFS, the false hopes of memristors, and the oral history of Transmeta.

Leave a Comment