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Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

#121

Post by onion2k »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #97
onion2k wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in the UK we have what's known as CPSPOC, or "Criminal Prosecution Service Proceeds of Crime" unit. Their job is to recover all proceeds from criminal activity. In this case I imagine they'll try to argue that the bitcoins mined with stolen electricity are proceeds of crime, and they'll confiscate them. The money recovered will go to the treasury after the electricity company has been compensated.

That assumes they can actually get the Bitcoin. It's also likely that there won't be anything left after compensating the power company, since the mining operation was likely unprofitable if taking the cost of electricity into account.

That assumes they can actually get the Bitcoin.

If they can't then they can also charge the people behind the electricity theft with a bunch of additional crimes about withholding the proceeds of crime, money laundering, refusing to hand over encryption keys, etc. If the operation was unprofitable that doesn't matter either - if the CPS determine you mined, say, 1000BTC then that's what you 'owe'. If you can't pay it then they'll seize your other assets up to that amount. That money is then used to pay the electricity company, government, etc.

The law is very much rigged against you if you're caught.

Re: Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

#123

Post by OJFord »

staticautomatic wrote: post #82
mewwts wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if you have all that money tied up in an old mining rig which has close to zero resale value.

Can mining rigs be repurposed for anything useful?

Depends what they actually are, some 'mining rigs' are just PCs with lots of beefy GPUs, so yeah.

Others are FPGAs programmed to compute the hash for whatever cryptocurrency (e.g. BTC is `sha256(sha256(x))`); they can be re-programmed to do something else instead.

Others are ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuits) based, physical chips designed to do nothing else but compute those hashes. So essentially 'no', but 'yes and they'd be very good at it' if you for some reason had another use for that particular hash function (lots and quickly).

That's also a progression of cost & performance, by the way. As the difficulty increases GPUs get slower at finding whatever coin, and people (pay a bit more and) move to FPGAs, and then again to dedicated ASIC hardware.

Re: Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

#124

Post by de6u99er »

scatters wrote: post #58
kleiba wrote: post #21

I say: combine the two (cannabis farming and bitcoin mining)!

Unfortunately the laws of thermodynamics will get in the way. Cannabis farming uses electricity to build organic chemicals and outputs waste heat at 40°C; bitcoin mining uses electricity to solve equations and outputs waste heat at 40°C. There's not really any way to use the waste products of one as an input to the other.

Cannabis farming would be much easier and cost effective if it could be done out in the open.

Re: Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

#125

Post by matwood »

koheripbal wrote: post #53
Joker_vD wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet we still call intellectual "property" just that, "intellectual property" even though it's not a property for most of the laws except for the ones written to specifically deal with intellectual "property". The wonderful world of law.

There's no "master" set of definitions in law. Every law has its own definitions. So contrary definitions are irrelevant.

Great point. Go look at any substantial legal agreement and there is normally a bunch of definitions at the top or in an amendment.

Re: Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

#126

Post by SamBam »

paulcole wrote: post #66
josefresco wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Profitability calculators typically rely on the current market rate of BTC. Even if they paid for electricity, they could make up for it by keeping their earnings in BTC/whatever. Whether that's a smart decision is another issue, but for some mining is like a startup in that you burn cash early in hopes of a big exit down the road. Edit: Several people have pointed out that you can just buy BTC or crypto directly. Be…

If you’re spending $1500 to mine $1000 in BTC and are bullish about the future of BTC, why not just buy $1500 of BTC?

But surely there's some reality where only buying $1000 BTC and just setting fire to another $500 is somehow more profitable, right?

Re: Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

#128

Post by roenxi »

koheripbal wrote: post #53
Joker_vD wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet we still call intellectual "property" just that, "intellectual property" even though it's not a property for most of the laws except for the ones written to specifically deal with intellectual "property". The wonderful world of law.

There's no "master" set of definitions in law. Every law has its own definitions. So contrary definitions are irrelevant.

Well ... irrelevant in the technical execution of the justice system. In practice it makes the laws easier to follow if people use the same words for the same concepts and tests.

If property means physical stuff in one law and thought in another it may become confusing to work out how to follow the law.

Re: Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

#129

Post by robjan »

derekp7 wrote: post #107
jaymzcampbell wrote: post #30

A little off topic but I always found it interesting that the "theft" of electricity is actually called Abstracting in UK law, since you can't really steal the electricity itself. > ...it was held that electricity could not be stolen as it is not property within the meaning of section 4 of the Theft Act 1968... Before the Computer Misuse Act 1990 those who misused computers ("hackers") were charged with abstracting e…

So there was not concept of "theft of service" then? Or was that also not called theft, but something else similar to abstracting? I.e., if you walked out without paying the barber or something like that.

That would be the crime of "Making off without payment"

Re: Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

#130

Post by adolph »

bluGill wrote: post #108
alex_young wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t that entirely dependent on your electrical rate? There must be some break even point right?

Not just electrical rate, also what you do with the waste heat. I know at least one person who is heating his garage. Mining bitcoin is cheaper than an electric heater for the same task. A heat pump would probably be more cost effective in the long run, but I didn't tell him that.

It might be worthwhile for larger electricity customers to perform off-peak mining. Or even better, for someone to offer mining as a service to those customers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogeneration

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