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Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity
- williesleg 5y agoNow that's some hacker news! On the home page twice!
- hughrr 5y agoSo the police are getting RTX cards this Christmas and we still aren't :(
- Hamuko 5y agoThose are ASICs. Mining Bitcoin on an RTX is untenable.
- amelius 5y agoNot if you get electricity for free.
- mvanaltvorst 5y agoThe police images show ASICs.
- drexlspivey 5y agoIt still is unless you get the GPUs for free as well
- knorker 5y agoWho says they wouldn't be stolen too?
- Slartie 5y agoEven when you get those stolen GPUs placed on your porch for free, you still have to set them up in mining rigs, install software, cables, cooling et cetera, and you need to cater to the hardware once it is running and fix problems coming up. The difference between Bitcoin ASICs and GPUs in performance is large enough to make the expenses with these activities not worth the hassle, even if you get the hardware AND the power for free.
- fnord77 5y agoother crapcoins are possible w/ GPUs https://whattomine.com/ https://whattomine.com/
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoEven with the new GPU mining protections that nvidia baked in? edit: i mean it's probably a moot point, mining at 10% efficiency is still worth money if you're tapping electricity from somewhere.
- Hamuko 5y agoThe protection is only against Ethereum specifically. You can mine non-Ethereum shitcoins at full blast.
- stallmanite 5y agoJust point them at a multipool and you can set it up to auto-switch to whatever "shitcoin" is currently most profitable and auto convert everything to BTC (or your output coin of choice). As someone who lived through the original GPU->FPGA->ASIC arms race it's surprising to me but you can make decent amounts of BTC with just a high end CPU let alone GPU rigs or old sha256 ASICs.
- ccity88 5y ago"The computer equipment has been seized but no arrests have been made, the force said." Whoever does get arrested for this, they won't be facing the same charges for intent to supply drugs. I'm not sure on the penalty of stealing electricity, but it's probably a lot less severe.
- cinntaile 5y agoI don't get your reply? Obviously they're not facing charges for intent to supply drugs because that's not what they did?
- sdflhasjd 5y agoComputer equipment getting seized is unusual for electricity theft.
- dboreham 5y agoPolice like to seize stuff.
- bryanrasmussen 5y agoIf it's a business getting raided for a crime I would expect some seizure of computer equipment might happen.
- Ensorceled 5y agoIn a consumer setting, I would be also be surprised. In this setting where it probably isn't clear exactly who the perpetrators are, you seize the assets until you can figure that out. I'm sure this wasn't all being done by "Sandwell Bitcoin Miners Ltd.", a registered British corporation majority owned by Joe Sandwell.
- bserge 5y agoIt will probably be returned.
- pjc50 5y ago
- josefresco 5y ago"Detectives said they were tipped off about lots of people visiting the unit throughout the day and a police drone picked up a lot of heat coming from the building." Does that imply a drone with infrared capabilities?
- philjohn 5y agoYes - they also have IR cameras on police helicopters and use this to identify likely cannabis farms fairly regularly in the UK.
- 542458 5y agoThey’re also useful for search&rescue as well as finding people who are trying hide in foliage, but yeah.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- andylynch 5y agoPossibly. But it could also be something as simple as a snow free roof when the neighbourhood is covered. Or one unusually dry after rain.
- sschueller 5y agoDJI sells a FLIR addon for their drones. [1] The mavic 2 enterprise is also available with a FLIR camera. [2] [1] https://www.dji.com/ch/zenmuse-xt https://www.dji.com/ch/zenmuse-xt [2] https://www.dji.com/ch/mavic-2-enterprise https://www.dji.com/ch/mavic-2-enterprise
- deepserket 5y agoyes, ir cameras are widely used in helicopters, eg. https://youtu.be/Q481RMKwpCY?t=45 https://youtu.be/Q481RMKwpCY?t=45 it's a no brainer to mount them on drones too
- tsukikage 5y ago...one has to wonder also why they needed to keep visiting the place once they set everything up.
- nuclearnice1 5y agoBased on heat and people coming and going, police assumed it was a cannabis farm . Based on that incorrect conclusion, they raided the place. Flimsy evidence.
- Hamuko 5y agoDidn't they raid the place because they knew that they were stealing electricity?
- nuclearnice1 5y agoGood point it sounds like the had a tip about that and some follow up with Western Power Distribution.
- Ensorceled 5y agoSooo ... not flimsy evidence?
- nuclearnice1 5y agoYeah, tip + follow up. Not just heat + many people. Why do you write “Sooo..”
- Ensorceled 5y agoA report from the public, unusual activity for the location, lots of heat that can't be explained by official electrical usage and, probably, not explained by the registered or zoned usage (probably light industrial). Sounds like more than enough to get a warrant.
- sokoloff 5y agoI personally would hope that wouldn’t be enough (at least in the US). I don’t see anything in the above list of facts that rises to articulable probable cause that a specific crime is being committed. (Maybe you could tighten the analysis a bit to get to PC that electricity or gas are being stolen. I’d be OK with that.)
- kleiba 5y agoI say: combine the two (cannabis farming and bitcoin mining)!
- dcolkitt 5y agoProof-of-Chillness
- bryanrasmussen 5y agoThere has got to be a British Gangster movie in this somewhere!
- Joker_vD 5y agoJust imagine that one scene from the Snatch! where Lincoln instead of a fianite tries to fend off a golden-painted manhole cover that the Pikies convinced him was a Bitcoin :) Edit: Oh God, it's actually an actual thing that already exists: [1] [1] https://bitcoinpenny.com/products/the-manhole-cover-physical-bitcoin https://bitcoinpenny.com/products/the-manhole-cover-physical...
- bryanrasmussen 5y agoSo I think it's more Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking barrels - with the big Bitcoin penny being used to smash in people's heads along the way - "hey, why's there so much blood on this thing?" "you don't wanna know" "I do want to know Tom, I do - enlighten me, where did all this blood come from? Wait a minute, is that hair and bits of brain down here? You don't normally see that kind of thing on coinage of the realm Tom" on edit: formatting, and made dialog more Ritchiean.
- Mauricebranagh 5y agoTommy Shelbys Grandsons and Greatgrand sons :-) Hey BBC want to hire me as technical consultant for the show
- scatters 5y agoUnfortunately 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.
- jaymzcampbell 5y agoA 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 electricity, as no other law applied https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstracting_electricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstracting_electricity
- Tomte 5y agoThe same problem and solution in Germany, but already in 1900: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entziehung_elektrischer_Energie https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entziehung_elektrischer_Energi... It seems that the French high court ruled differently, and they just prosecuted it under the regular theft statute.
- Joker_vD 5y agoAnd 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.
- igravious 5y agoVery good point.
- koheripbal 5y agoThere's no "master" set of definitions in law. Every law has its own definitions. So contrary definitions are irrelevant.
- matwood 5y agoGreat point. Go look at any substantial legal agreement and there is normally a bunch of definitions at the top or in an amendment.
- _joel 5y agoThose ASIC's look old, however if you're not paying for power then it's all profit.
- santamex 5y agoHow does the police think it is a good idea to make the raid when no one is inside. The article said that a lot of people go in and out everyday and no one was arrested. I don’t get it.
- Mauricebranagh 5y agoMy thought as well I suspect they thought they would catch a bunch of trafficked people well at least they didn't Get Prti Patel down for the photo op.
- notacoward 5y agoHaving people there raises the probability of either injury or evidence destruction/contamination. They probably know who those people are anyway, so once they have the evidence they can go after the people one by one at leisure.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sandwell 5y agoNothing to do with me >.>
- phire 5y agoLooking at the picture, they are using really old bitcoin ASIC miners from 2017. A profitability calculator I found says this Antminer S9 can get $948/year of income in exchange for $1,371 worth of electricity. That's a loss of $422/year. Obviously it's not profitable to use anymore, unless you are literally stealing electricity like these guys.
- alex_young 5y agoIsn’t that entirely dependent on your electrical rate? There must be some break even point right?
- phire 5y agoThat website was using a electrical rate of USD 12c per kWh, which is already on the low side. I think most electricity The break-even point is 8c per kWh. But there will be other overheads, so you probably need 6c per kWh to actually make a profit. Such prices most be possible to obtain in a few oil rich countries like Saudi Arabia and Iraq.
- kasey_junk 5y agoYou can routinely get ~2 c kWh in Chicago: https://hourlypricing.comed.com/ https://hourlypricing.comed.com/
- oliwarner 5y agoBloody hell, not in the UK. £0.15/kWh is pretty standard. If you go wholesale there are microscopic portions where it dips as low as minus-£0.10/kWh but generally you're still looking at 10p a unit or more. Of course this is moot when you're not paying the bill, as this story says.
- phire 5y agoThat's not the total price. It doesn't include Transmission, distribution, taxes or whatever a "Capacity Charge" is.
- knorker 5y agoI'm shocked, SHOCKED, to see organized crime committing crimes.
- Mauricebranagh 5y agoBit odd the Cops didn't wait intel the premises had visitors inside would could have been arrested.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- onionisafruit 5y agoI would be curious to know how much mining is done using stolen electricity.
- geuis 5y agoIt’s pretty obvious isn’t it? Plug mining rigs into someone else’s power outlet.
- quickthrower2 5y agoHow much was asked. Not how.
- boringg 5y agoYou'd think the UK grid has better tech for revenue protection (Aka protection against stealing). There have been a lot of companies who specialize in doing this in the US. Its a combination of data processing and decent quality hardware on the grid. My suspicion is they haven't done upgrades on their systems...
- avianlyric 5y agoYou’re making the assumption that the loss is large enough to warrant the hardware improvements. Getting high quality data about an electricity grid is extremely expensive and difficult. A big part of that in the U.K. is driven by the fact that most of our distribution networks are underground, which means that a lot of equipment is located below ground level. This gives you one big problem, the place where you want to install your fancy new sensors are all located in places that most telecom systems don’t/can’t serve (4G doesn’t work very well in a hole). Plus to make your life even harder, power distribution equipment puts of plenty of EM interference, making radio comms even harder. So you can put the hardware in, you just can’t communicate with it. Making it kinda useless. Obviously there are plenty of place were this isn’t true, but they’re in the minority. End result is that lots of fancy equipment doesn’t get deployed.
- boringg 5y agoCounter - How do you know the level of loss if you don't have visibility into it?
- bb611 5y ago(Power put on lines - expected transmission losses) * billed cost of power - customer payments. I hope for the sake of their billing department they're using a database and some customized software for the data, but could just as likely be in a large and painful excel spreadsheet. Power theft is not particularly interesting to the power company unless they're not getting paid for it. If it's just the wrong person paying, that's their problem.
- quickthrower2 5y ago
- gberger 5y agoWhat is a "Sandwell Bitcoin mine"?
- jasoncartwright 5y agoIt's a bitcoin mine in Sandwell, England
- imtringued 5y agoCrackpot idea. The entire point of cryptocurrency mining is that you prove that you have burned X dollars worth of energy. Why not cut the middlemen and just let miners pay in dollars (stablecoins technically)? We can then donate the left over dollars to charities.
- paulgb 5y agoBecause someone would have to verify that the money was donated, which would be impossible to do in an entirely distributed way. I agree that it would be a Pareto improvement if such coordination were actually possible, though.
- quickthrower2 5y agoThis might be how the more centralised coins like Ripple and IOTA work
- linsomniac 5y ago"Police expected to find a cannabis farm." Back when I was mining Bitcoin, I expected to be raided because of this. That was back before CO legalized. Never ended up happening though.
- runeks 5y ago> A suspected Bitcoin "mining" operation illegally stealing electricity […] So they weren’t just stealing, they were stealing illegally?