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thewayneThe seized rigs, worth over $1,000,000, had been hacked into the country's power grid and stole over $2,000,000 worth of electricity. And had caused three house fires.
No estimate as to how many bitcoins they had mined. I hope the police had been able to seize said bitcoins or whatever cryptocurrency they were generating.
So the police laid them out in the parking lot, brought in a steamroller, and crushed them to smithereens!
For the most part, these are not normal computers. These use ASICs, application-specific integrated circuits that are specifically programmed to perform the calculations specific to mining bitcoins. I'll explain more about bitcoins and what mining means another day.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/19/malaysian-police-steamroll-1point25-million-worth-of-bitcoin-mining-rigs.html
Now, here's the bad part.
China has outlawed bitcoin mining. Guess where the large-scale bitcoin mining operations are fleeing to?
The U.S.A.
We're the country with the next-cheapest electricity in the world. So expect over the next couple of years to see more stories of illegal power grid taps and warehouses of mining rigs being discovered.
No estimate as to how many bitcoins they had mined. I hope the police had been able to seize said bitcoins or whatever cryptocurrency they were generating.
So the police laid them out in the parking lot, brought in a steamroller, and crushed them to smithereens!
For the most part, these are not normal computers. These use ASICs, application-specific integrated circuits that are specifically programmed to perform the calculations specific to mining bitcoins. I'll explain more about bitcoins and what mining means another day.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/19/malaysian-police-steamroll-1point25-million-worth-of-bitcoin-mining-rigs.html
Now, here's the bad part.
China has outlawed bitcoin mining. Guess where the large-scale bitcoin mining operations are fleeing to?
The U.S.A.
We're the country with the next-cheapest electricity in the world. So expect over the next couple of years to see more stories of illegal power grid taps and warehouses of mining rigs being discovered.
no subject
Date: 2021-07-20 03:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-20 03:21 pm (UTC)Worrying about Canada as a target for such people to flee to, as we're already deemed intolerably friendly to money-launderers. I fear our being dismembered as a country in order to serve their interests, much as the UK has been sabotaged via Brexit to protect the "laundromat" operations there.
no subject
Date: 2021-07-20 05:05 pm (UTC)It truly is.
no subject
Date: 2021-07-20 11:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-21 12:36 am (UTC)Yup. Very true.
no subject
Date: 2021-07-21 02:50 am (UTC)I'm probably naïve, but I don't get it. Since bitcoin is so profitable, wouldn't it make sense to spread out the locations of the computers, pay the electric bills, and maybe avoid notice by the authorities?
Not that I'm advocating criminals should be able to avoid getting caught... but it seems that piling illegal activity on top of illegal activity just makes it harder to hide. Am I missing something, or it just that criminals just don't think like we do?
no subject
Date: 2021-07-21 03:12 am (UTC)At a guess, the criminals have a big investment in all these mining rigs. Tapping into the power grid isn’t easy and they have to keep an eye on the tap and they also need to keep an eye on the equipment, so best to keep it centralized. Plus, they don’t want another gang stealing their gear, they have to defend it. Which makes it vulnerable to theft by a stronger gang, i.e. the police, which is a much stronger gang.
no subject
Date: 2021-07-22 12:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-22 12:41 am (UTC)I have an icon, which I haven't loaded, that says "I will become a billionaire when I figure out how to stab people across the internet." Of course, there would be a lot of mysteriously-stabbed cryptocurrency holders all of a sudden.
no subject
Date: 2021-07-28 06:32 am (UTC)