Why You Shouldn’t Mine Cryptocurrencies Using Play Station 5
The umpteenth BitCoin rally has stimulated a flurry of new activities in cyberspace. Beware – greed is not always good!
And if something sounds too good to be true, usually the reason is that… it is false.
A recent report that someone successfully used a modified PlayStation 5 to mine Ether (ETH) turned out to be a fake.
Since the new Play Stations 5 are hard to find on the market today, don’t risk your brand new toy if you are one of the lucky ones who managed to get one.
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The news outlet GizChina was faking it when stating that Chinese software developer Yifan Gu was mining Ether Using a PlayStation 5.
GizChina suggested that the developer probably overclocked the PS5’s AMD Ryzen CPU and AMD Radeon GPU cards.
The hyperbolic claim was that this technique resulted in a mining hash rate of 98.76 megahertz per second.
A purported screenshot from Gu also showed that the power necessary to run the hacked hardware was 211 watts.
The hoax spread like wildfire on several outlets before anyone added one and one and realized it was utterly unrealistic.
Hardly anyone noticed that the “screenshot” shared by the mysterious developer contained a QR code message.
The content? “There is no such software,” followed by laughing.
Whoever has even minimal technical knowledge of bitcoin mining would have known as much from the start.
While it is true that ETH is less demanding than Bitcoin (BTC), which requires highly powerful computers like an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC).
But there still are many urban legends circulating that are far from the truth.
In April 2020, for example, Developer 1st Playable had to react against rumors that one of their games was used to hijack Nintendo’s Switch console to mine Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
The game, Cooking Mama: Cookstar, had some connection to blockchain technology, but nothing like the speculations that were circulating.
What 1st Playable was considering was using blockchain “as a means to allow players to trade in-game assets.”
Ethereum, Dogecoin, and some other cryptocurrencies that are less calculation-intensive than BTC can, in theory, be mined with a Graphic Processing Unit (GPU), if it is sufficiently powerful.
The consumption of electric power is still very high, and so is the risk of damaging equipment because of overheating.
The use of heat monitoring software is always recommended.
Even with precautions, becoming rich by mining cryptocurrencies with home hacks is highly unlikely.
Reflect on this: a new report from Morgan Stanley has disclosed that Bitcoin mining operations gobbled up 30 times the amount of power that would have been needed to charge every single Tesla circulating in 2017.
No wonder that one of the most developed branches of cyber criminality today is cryptojacking.
Malware of this type injects code that allows a hacker to use hundreds of computers of unsuspecting victims to mine cryptocurrencies for him.
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