thewayne: (Default)
The 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.
thewayne: (Default)
The Ukraine operation was stealing power from the grid at an order of $260,000 PER MONTH! using rigged power meters. The equipment seized included 5,000 PCs and 3,800 PlayStations, along with various other things. One hopes they also seized a bunch of the mined Bitcoins!

https://www.yahoo.com/news/look-inside-underground-crypto-mining-090129713.html


The Texas operation. Sigh. Because Texas has cheap energy and an absolutely infallible power grid, an operation has started up there that, when completed, will consume 750 MEGAWATTS of energy. The mayor of the town is so invested that he himself has his own server rack mining Bitcoin.

As an example, 750 megawatts is enough to power 150,000 homes. And Bitcoins are backed by - absolutely nothing. They're vaporware backed by the faith of the people who have bought them and are willing to buy and sell them. They've been proven to be no where near as anonymous as originally touted, witnessed by the number of people in prison for illegal drug, weapon, and murder for hire attempts, such as the operators of the Silk Road.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-miners-break-ground-texas-213205425.html


Greed over common sense, any and every day.

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