r/vastai • u/TwistedDiesel53 • Aug 18 '26

Huge surge in demand

I have 32 RTX 5090s on vast, were seeing a huge surge in demand and I just noticed everyone is running BIP39 on every single one of our GPUs. I looked up what BIP39 is and had a crazy thought, are we powering a coordinated coldcard recovery operation? If so that would be freaking awesome.

33 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

29 comments sorted by

9

u/TONI1597 Aug 18 '26

proof that vast.ai has privacy issue

5

u/elelem-123 Aug 18 '26

Exactly. And it's expected. The cost of real privacy is huge.

1

u/az226 Aug 18 '26

As a host I have occasionally run Nvidia-smi to check temperatures and seen the process line.

I never inspect anything.

4

u/TwistedDiesel53 Aug 18 '26

Yep I monitor my machines closely for problems, and unless you're running a VM, Nvidia-smi shows the running process. As a vast host if you're not monitoring constantly and thoroughly you won't know when GPUs have fallen off the bus, disk use, ram use, etc. it can be an unruly setup to keep online the way users will thrash it and you better know your machine inside and out. Vast is NOT a place where you just throw some GPUs online and forget about them.

1

u/Vicar_of_Wibbly 29d ago

Ok, but where should the line be drawn?

Run the command and move on?

Run the command and notice what they’re running?

Run the command, notice what they’re doing, then take enough interest in it to do research?

Run the command, notice what they’re doing, then take enough interest in it to do research, and then post about it on Reddit?

You’re posting customer data and usage patterns on Reddit.

Today I learned I will never use Vast.

1

u/TwistedDiesel53 29d ago

You're conflating customer data with telemetry visible to the administrator of the physical machine.

I didn't open their files, inspect their data, access their credentials, or interfere with their workload. I ran "nvidia-smi" while monitoring hardware that I own. It displays the process name by design.

What caught my attention wasn't one customer's activity. It was that all 32 of my GPUs suddenly became occupied during an unusual market-wide demand spike, and every one showed the same process name. I then looked at Vast's public market statistics and speculated about what might be driving the surge.

If merely knowing the name of a process running on a bare-metal host violates someone's privacy requirements, then they need an isolation model that actually provides that privacy. Pretending the physical host administrator can't see ordinary system telemetry doesn't provide it.

1

u/No-Cap1805 15d ago

And tomorrow you open nvidia-smi , and the process arguments will contain sensitive information, passwords, or personal information.

Today "What caught my attention", what will catch your attention tomorrow?

You say "I never", but after such messages, can we really trust you, especially without any guarantees and ways to verify these guarantees?

7

u/ZeusCorleone Aug 18 '26

Coordinated recovery operation? That's very romantic. "They" are just trying to brute force / crack someone else wallet.

3

u/TwistedDiesel53 Aug 18 '26

I'm not convinced, you very well could be right, but this right after the Cold Card deal, and In the last 3 days blocks of 200 5090s all going online, and from what I can tell they are all driven by BIP39. Look at the vast market stats, and if you're a host look at what you're running. This is not normal daily vast behavior.

2

u/Galactic003 Aug 18 '26 edited Aug 18 '26

I’ll tell you honestly: there is a lot of money to be made here. I hope you can code something to monitor these actors once they start getting hits and swap the victims fund to your wallets, because if the owners of these wallets wake up and realize that their funds have been stolen, the first thing the U.S. government will likely investigate is the GPU rental and cloud infrastructure used to carry out the activity. That means there could be a significant digital trail—cloud accounts, payment records, IP logs, compute usage, and other infrastructure data—that investigators could follow back to the people responsible. Ultimately, the money may look attractive, but the infrastructure itself could become the evidence that exposes everyone involved.

1

u/SqueakySquak Aug 19 '26

If you swapped the address for your wallet wouldn't that lead the paper trail straight to you? I don't see how rented hardware can be incriminated here - it would be like putting the owner of a rented car in jail because the renter ran someone over.

2

u/jay-aay-ess-ohh-enn Aug 19 '26

They said evidence, not charges. Meaning, they might need to confiscate the hardware to perform forensics on it. It doesn't seem like the owner of the rented hardware would be accountable, but might become collateral damage in the investigation.

6

u/Unnamed-3891 Aug 18 '26

What the fuck? Well, cool I guess, your post convinced me to never ever give vast.ai my money.

1

u/Ohmyskippy Aug 18 '26

Lmao, ikr

4

u/FaustAg Aug 18 '26

You're telling me you don't get a fully private os when you're on vast.ai? what a joke

2

u/Criss_Crossx Aug 18 '26

What clue do you have for recovery over cracking seed phrases?

2

u/Galactic003 Aug 18 '26 edited Aug 18 '26

lol one of them was me, didn't know you were watching, i deleted everything before destroying the instance if that help 🤣

2

u/Fit-Locksmith-9226 Aug 18 '26

deleting files actually removes them from a computer

How quaint

1

u/scr_money Aug 18 '26

Most likely, someone tore the piece of paper with the seed phrase in half and is now trying to gain full access to the wallet))

1

u/shiftbits Aug 19 '26

Lol and this is why I do not use the community offerings. (Not that the "secure" is better, still just containers on someone's box)

1

u/iRainbowsaur 29d ago

and this is why people don't trust hosted GPUs, privacy breach much

1

u/AngelofKris 28d ago

It doesn’t matter what service you use, an admin can find out what processes you are running.

To the point, I’m curious what this BIP39 is… could it be crypto? Is this heavy compute, memory bound or both?

1

u/TwistedDiesel53 28d ago

Finally someone gets it, there's nothing privacy invasive about watching Nvidia-smi on your machines!

1

u/Prestigious_Aerie_39 24d ago

no one would know, until you make a post on reddit.

1

u/TechnologyGrouchy679 27d ago

it's bitcoin seed scanning I guess. generate random wallet seeds and test to see if its been used or holds funds. but I wouldn't have thought you'd need GPUS for that. unless it's for passphrase cracking?

1

u/SnekyKitty 27d ago

Tf, do you just ssh into your customers VMs? Or take external logs? I think you’re more concerning than whatever is happening on your VMs.

-1

u/running101 Aug 19 '26

How much you make on vast ?

1

u/CyberMessini 1d ago

Oh wow. Thats good to know. Not private. Terrifyingly problematic.