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.

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About 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.

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