Looking 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.
Who buys stolen electricity? Bitcoin miners and weed growers ... at best! Selling this to homes would be even more illegal because of the negligence. Someone could get killed fucking around with that much power.
"$20 to fully charge your EV", "$5 to charge your phone" ? Installing fake solar panels & a net meter & selling the stolen energy back to the utility company? Just live off of stolen electricity to cut your monthly expenses by $100 a month, while also having to steal significantly less so that it could've gone unnoticed? IDK, but the whole thing makes me think of stealing a painting only to sell the frame to a recycling center. Yes, you're still ahead, but maybe there was a better way to profit from the crime?
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.
Yeah, during the winter I mine on my video card because I'm basically just swapping some of my natural gas heat out for a few hundred watts of electric heat and my electricity is primarily provided by nuclear and hydro.
Kind of weird to think of mining as a way to reduce your carbon emissions but in some cases it certainly can be.
I'll definitely look more into heatpumps when it comes time to replace my furnace or air conditioner, but my understanding is they perform quite poorly in Canadian winters.
> my electricity is primarily provided by nuclear and hydro. Kind of weird to think of mining as a way to reduce your carbon emissions but in some cases it certainly can be.
I think you are likely mistaken, although it is a surprisingly common misconception. Most places in the world, if you are using an extra kWh of power, the system needs to generate up to an extra marginal kWh from coal or gas.
Example 1: France generates power 70% from nuclear. However if a French person uses an extra kWh during base load, that could easily lead to one less kWh exported, which would most likely mean one extra kWh is generated from say coal somewhere else in Europe.
Example 2: New Zealand generates 60% of power from hydro. If I use an extra kWh of power at the moment (even at cheap rates), then if we have a drought in 6 months time, then an extra kWh needs to be generated from coal in 6 months time. I am presuming the coming critical storm[1] this weekend won’t fill our hydro lakes[2] and that the predicted long term dry weather pattern[0] will occur. I am a New Zealander.
You could be right if you are only using your power when it is cheapest (which usually implies the usage of base load nuclear), although it is surprisingly difficult to actually figure out whether you have generated zero extra carbon.
Edit: on second thoughts in NZ I am sure our lakes can’t fill that quickly from one good storm - the inflow rate is limited by the size of the river and the inflow rate is small compared to the storage size?
This seems like a silly way to look at production though - you could say every kWh in the system is a "marginal kWh" if you think about it like this. Turning on your oven, charging your car, etc would be similar in effect. If you really wanted to get involved you'd have to look at power imports and exports as well.
While it's true that fossil fuels do provide an important role in variable management of the grid still, this is also accomplished with hydroelectric quite heavily in my area and over time the rates of each production method will adjust accordingly so I think it's still a reasonable assessment to look at overall production.
I think you’re ignoring the concept of it being marginal, it’s marginal because they’re on the margin of choosing to mine or to turn up the heating. Those other activities aren’t marginal you need to cook, you need to drive, etc.
Cooking, though, is an activity that puts demand on the grid for a short time. Mining BTC to heat your house is a constant and predictable load. There are plenty of houses in canada with electric furnaces - Last I checked Hydro Quebec would help subsidize the cost if you switched from gas to electric heat.
Even a constant and predictable load will cause some extra carbon dioxide output. How much depends on a variety of factors.
For example, during any period that the nuclear and hydro are running at capacity. If you reduced your constant power usage by 1kWh then during those peak periods, 1kWh less gas generation would be used by the network.
If your constant 1kWh of electricity would otherwise be exported to the US if you didn't use it, then it could be that 1kWh less coal generation would be used at some times.
Most people find it difficult to think about how their marginal increase in usage very often will cause extra CO2. Even writing this comment down has made me think about how CO2 production also depends on the future predictions of generators. It is complicated, but worth spending time to think about.
I know - it is complicated. The commercial rate here in Ontario for large consumers is based on the delta between expected load and actual load. If the expected load is much higher than actual, it can actually go into negative pricing (if they have a big nuclear reactor they can’t or don’t want to spin down, they will literally pay you to use the electricity.) I had a friend at a big company here that had some large refrigeration units for medical related stuff, but they had quite a wide range of temperatures they were allowed to be. So my friend wrote a script that scrapes Ontario Hydro’s website to fetch the commercial rate, and when it was high he’d let the temperature climb a little, and when it was low he’d cool the units a little more. Ended up saving seven figures a year.
I don't know about Canadian winters, but heat pumps certainly perform well in Swedish winters, which I don't imagine are much milder than Canadian ones.
If you can get a water-water heat pump you'll be fine for sure (requires drilling a rather deep hole in your backyard tho, so the initial investment is a bit bigger)
While geothermal systems do use heat pumps, the term "heat pump" in general conversation almost always refers to air-source heat pumps (air to air), not geothermal. In the US/Canada, drilling additional wells is prohibitively expensive for most people, which is why geothermal systems haven't taken off.
Heat pumps don't perform very well, or at all, when it's -30° or -40°, so a secondary heat source is needed. Usually, that will be natural gas, in which case why bother with a heat pump when you can just burn much cheaper natural gas?
Oh, in Swedish they're both called heat pumps, i didn't realize there was such a distinction in the English language between the two systems.
In my mind they're just different kinds of heat pumps.
And yeah, drilling is pretty expensive, but once the system is installed, heating is ridiculously cheap. When my parents installed geothermal, ROI was estimated to about 5 years for their house iirc.
But then it may well be that drilling is cheaper here by virtue of being more common, idk.
There both is and isn't. If someone says heat pump in a generic heating context they don't care. However most of the time the difference is significant, so geothermo is added as a qualifier where that is what is meant, and heat pump alone means air to air. You have to guess from context which it is though - and you won't always be right.
I've heard before that the climate in Sweden is relatively mild considering its latitude, mostly due to the marine currents. A quick comparison of climate seems to suggest that this is the case: https://www.weather2travel.com/weather-comparison/?placename...
Air source heat pumps are fine for the places where most Canadians live including southern Ontario & Quebec and coastal British Columbia. If you live in Winnipeg or Saskatoon it might be dicey, but unless it routinely drops below -20C for extended periods you're fine. And you can have backup resistive heating elements for the occasional cold snap anyways.
> I'm basically just swapping some of my natural gas heat out for a few hundred watts of electric heat
Except now you have to compare efficiency of your natural gas system vs efficiency of the power plant + electric heater. Chances are that energy efficiency of the power plant + an electric space heater (which is what you're turning your PC into) is smaller than the efficiency of your furnace. Quick googling comes up with energy efficiency of 60% for natural gas powered plants, while I don't think you'll be able to buy a gas furnace that has efficiency smaller than 80% these days...
IIUC, the only way you can mine without worrying about energy usage is if you have electric space heaters in your home - then it doesn't matter if you turn on the PC or the heater. Or if you own solar panels and you are producing more than you are not able to use (or sell).
To summarize the part about efficiencies, by heating up your place with electricity instead of gas, the power plant needs to burn ~50% more gas (& so 50% more emissions) than you'd have to if you were to use your furnace. Intuitively, other fossil-fuel power plants will also cause larger emissions than you would locally (as they all start with burning stuff for heat & only then convert that to electricity with some losses, while you could stop there), but I haven't run the numbers. Thermodynamics is a b*tch.
Probably, though I live in an area where 50% of our electricity comes from the wind, so if the wind is blowing electric heat is far less CO2, while if the wind isn't blowing electric heat is far more.
In that case the problem becomes what other poster mentioned: it's a zero-sum game so you increasing your energy consumption takes green energy from someone else. Maybe if you mined only when you knew that the energy would be curtailed otherwise? Not sure how to know that though...
> Kind of weird to think of mining as a way to reduce your carbon emissions but in some cases it certainly can be.
Have you actually done that calculation out? You say "primarily provided by", but I wonder what that means, given just how much electricity you need to actually heat a home via GPUs.
(You may of course be saving money given the profit you generate, but that's not the same thing as reducing emissions.)
Well, just to give you an idea, my province typically ranges from 1-10% provided by fossil fuels and of the fossil fuels - it's just natural gas. I'm sure there's some line losses there, but I don't think they're enough to overcome the 90%+ of energy coming from other sources.
Of course, I'm not heating my entire home with a single GPU, merely offsetting a small portion of my overall heating cost.
I'm very curious how that can be better then an electrical heater.
It has to be more inefficient as you are not spending energy on calculation but if you substitute it with selling your bitcoins you would need to compensate your co2
It's pretty brilliant actually. Case 1 electric space heaters blindly pass electricity through dumb wires. Case 2 instead of dumb wires you use ASICs. Case 2 is a win win that helps secure a decentralized monetary asset, get paid for it, and heat your home which you would have done anyway, all with the exact same carbon footprint (assuming you're expending equivalent amount of electricity to just heat your home as originally planned). You've basically turned PoW into proof of heating where the miner gets paid and gets the benefit of heating his home on top. And incremental environmental impact is exactly 0.
The only minor issue being that the materials used in fabricating the ASIC are likely more expensive (money and energy-wise) than those for a conventional heater!
Wow, this is actually amazing. In my country electric showers are really popular. They're literally just big resistances immersed in water. I wonder how long it'll take for them to put cryptocurrency miners in there.
Technically a "perfect" miner would use zero energy (beyond microamps for driving the signal wires in the network cables), the heat comes from imperfect components that "waste" energy by turning it into heat.
So the mining itself doesn't use any energy, it's just that instead of dumping power into a dumb coil of wire, you dump it into a smarter coil of wires and various components that produce some output (that happens to be valuable to the Bitcoin network and it rewards you in exchange) as a side-effect.
For any given watt of electricity, the heat output is the same, just that with a miner you also get useful calculation results out of it.
The Landauer principle states that any computation involving information erasure (e.g., taking the hash of blocks) must correspond to some nonzero increase in entropy, which would be expressed here as heat.
Heat is the most retrograde form of energy - the form with the most entropy. You can put 100W into a resistor, and you’ll get out 100W of heat. You can put 100W into a lightbulb, and it will generate less than 100W of light and some heat (because it’s not perfectly efficient) but in a room with no windows that light will bounce around until it’s absorbed by the walls and turned into heat so the room will heat up the same as if you had a 100W heater. If you put 100W into a miner, it will mine bitcoins and shed 100W of heat.
Water always runs downhill, energy always follows entropy down into heat.
Edit: Maybe this example will make more sense - consider an old fashioned record player. If the turntable is magnetically levitated, and is in a vacuum chamber, you can spend a tiny amount of energy to spin the table up to 45 rpm, and then (with no needle on the record) it will spin at that speed basically forever, because it's in a frictionless environment (there's no real frictionless environment, of course - you'll need a tiny amount of energy to keep it going). If you have an old turntable from the 70s where all the cheap grease has hardened, then to keep it spinning, the motor will have to do some work. Let's say you're putting 5W in to keep it turning. That 5W is overcoming the friction from the air, and from the old grease, and from the belt drive that runs the turn table. That friction is generating 5W of heat. It has to be, because if it was generating less than 5W of heat then either we'd be using less than 5W to maintain a steady state, or the else the turntable would be accelerating until we were using 5W to maintain a steady state.
My understanding is it's essentially just as efficient as a resistive electrical heater as all the energy used in your video card is converted to heat at some point in the process. There may be some very minor loss here, but I'm not enough of a physicist to say what it'd be.
That energy is all turned into heat. Waste from the point of view of a bitcoin mining attempt. However heat is a useful byproduct in this case when the local temperature is lower than the inhabitant would desire.
Because it also generates revenue via bitcoin. So it's "cheaper" insofar as the bitcoin is subsidizing the operation of the rig and, as a byproduct, heating the space.
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.
How does that come close to refuting the fact that using a Bitcoin miner as heating device also gives you Bitcoins, which the comment you replied to outlined?
Capacity charge is how they reduce the shitstorms that happen when the cost of electricity skyrockets and real time pricing becomes national news. They're basically forcing you to hedge your future electricity usage.
If you shut off your bitcoin miners during the warmest parts of the day, your capacity charge will go down.
I did the math in my area/provider and it came out to a .01 discount on the standard rate, which is not much of a discount at all. Even for the largest industrial, multi megawatt plans, which was surprising.
Bloody 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.
My actual billed amount ranges between 10-12 c per kWh. The hourly rates are highly variable and my usage needs are pretty constant. But if you had a high variable load keeping your rate below 5 c per kWh doesn’t seem that hard in Chicago.
It seems like an ideal way to use excess energy in grid-tied solar setups where the energy company is not incentivized to buy excess power. Or for non-grid tied solar when your batteries are full.
> It seems like an ideal way to use excess energy in grid-tied solar setups where the energy company is not incentivized to buy excess power. Or for non-grid tied solar when your batteries are full.
The ideal way to use excess energy is to do almost anything else besides pointless proof-of-work computations (e.g some scientific distributed computing thing).
Explain to me how Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme. There is no buy-in, there is no exit strategy, no dividends, no recruiting, there is nothing that makes it look like a pyramid scheme of any kind.
Maybe you mean that the early holders of Bitcoin have gained more wealth than later adopters or something? I'm not sure what you mean, actually. But that is just how a market works.
Ideally you'd store it, but if your system is sized for the short days of winter, you may have excess energy in the summer that you cannot store once your batteries are full.
Can't graphics cards still be used profitably to mine other cryptocurrencies though?
I don't follow this stuff too closely but my understanding is that graphics card prices are a good indicator here, and that GPU-powered mining is still acting to drive up prices.
GPU mining is currently concentrated on ETH, which is changing (EIP 1559) mid-July (and then later this year). The GPU market will change (and already is) dramatically after that. Many are still in denial, hoping there will be "another coin" to mine. Or, they're just spreading false hope to give them time to dump their hardware.
I don't think this is the first time I've read of a substantial change being made to a cryptocurrency. Doesn't this kind of thing completely belie the usual claim that it's free from central control?
> Many are still in denial, hoping there will be "another coin" to mine.
Again I don't follow this stuff that closely, but this doesn't seem absurd on the face of it. Is there a reason to think this won't happen?
> Doesn't this kind of thing completely belie the usual claim that it's free from central control?
It's consensus based, and the core ETH developers have a strong following. There likely will be (and probably already are) forks of ETH that keep proof-of-work, but they'll likely wither off if they don't have a large enough backing behind them.
> I don't think this is the first time I've read of a substantial change being made to a cryptocurrency. Doesn't this kind of thing completely belie the usual claim that it's free from central control?
As I understand it, what actually happens is it 'forks'. Like open source software - anyone free to use it differently or change it dramatically, but most people will stick with the branch maintained most actively or by the original maintainers.
> [There being another coin to mine] doesn't seem absurd on the face of it. Is there a reason to think this won't happen?
There are already loads, so I suppose no, of course it will/already has. The trouble is it needs a high enough valuation (with volume) to support the sunk cost of hardware to anywhere near the extent that Ethereum has for them.
> Doesn’t this kind of thing completely belie the usual claim that it’s free from central control?
Why would something changing mean it’s centrally controlled? Bitcoin has also undergone changes (although not as big as this one) and it that doesn’t mean it’s not decentralized.
This is not the first time substantial changes have been to crypto currencies (etherium or otherwise.) One recent change to bitcoin (I think the lightning network) was controversial enough to result in a fork (bitcoin cash.) There are mechanisms for this sort of thing.
Basically, today fees make up ~40% of payout for miners.
with EIP 1559, those fees will be reduced and also completely burned instead of given to miners.
Instead, miners will receive "tips" from users trying to encourage faster block inclusion.
No one knows how much "tips" will make up for the lost revenue, so it's kind of hard to mount a sizable resistance to the change, in the context of the obvious benefits it conveys to miners by making the currency healthier.
Mining profitability hugely varies based on how much traffic there is on the ethereum network, since you have to pay higher fees to include your transaction in a block if there is a lot of demand. EIP 1559 changes the fee structure. It wants to burn the new basefee so miners don't profit from that, there is still a small tip part left though.
I doubt they are mining bitcoin, probably the police just making assumptions at this point.
Also there is no way that this setup's electricity would cost that little in UK. The average cost of electricity bill for an average household is around £700 a year. If they paid, this would literally be thousands if not 10k+ a year in electricity bills.
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. Besides the initial hardware cost (which requires cash up front) how do you generate income to buy crypto on a regular basis?
Some industrial scale miners might have commitments to buy electricity at a certain rate. It could be more expensive to break a contract than to keep their equipment running when the exchange rate temporarily falls below profitability.
Also not everyone has easy access to an exchange. Others may prefer to avoid the KYC paperwork, or simply be willing to pay a premium for freshly mined coins.
There's a healthy power market - so the providers can and should work out a way for their clients to exit their contract and for them to sell the electricity elsewhere.
Sure the client might be liable for some loss-of-earnings fees but this really should be better for everyone than this.
Sure, but also take into account that a mining operation large enough to enter into electricity contracts probably has other obligations like facilities and staff. Overall it may not be worth the hassle to shutdown for what could be interpreted as typical exchange rate fluctuations.
Nope, the ones in the article are ASICs, so specifically for bitcoin. There are GPU based ones but the number of coins that you can mine with them is dwindling. You could probably reuse the beaglebone black or whatever little auxillary computer they're using but it's not really worth it. It's just e-waste.
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.
Not really they're extremely specialized chips that only do lots of hashes fast. They can't even be used for an different blockchain unless it's block hashing is similar enough and uses the same algorithm.
This is key. You can't "just buy BTC directly" if you don't have cash. Even if you have cash for the initial purchase of crypto, you then have no recurring income. The startup model is again relevant here as you're trading a short term loss, for the potential of a long term gain. Similarly, why don't VC's just invest in profitable, stable companies?
If you have the money to pay for the electricity you'll see more profit by just buying the BTC at the current market price. You start making money immediately instead of having to make it to the electricity price you paid. So it still only makes sense as a strategy if you're stealing electricity, have an off grid system with excess electricity (or you don't get paid for back feeding the grid) or have a (really really) weird cashflow situation.
Let's assume your mining rig costs $1 to run, generates 1 FAKECOIN with a current value of $.90. That first month you pay $0.10 out of pocket for 1 FAKECOIN. If you had just purchased 1 FAKECOIN, it would have cost you $1. 10x the cost. Like a startup, this is not sustainable without external factors changing. "Just buy it directly" requires a separate income.
My mistake, I'm a moron. The math is just worse, because you'd have to cash out some of your FAKECOIN for electricity. I'll accept the downvotes with dignity!
If you agree to purchase $1500/mo from the power company for 12 months, and they’re going to bill you that no matter what, then losing $500/mo (and keeping BTC that’s likely to increase in value eventually) is preferable to shutting down and losing $1500/mo.
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 electricity, as no other law applied
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.
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.
Property, in law, practically always means "something someone owns". Intellectual property is something someone owns, just as a house is. I'm not sure there are conflicting definitions in the law.
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.
"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?
Yup, that's been pretty commonplace for a few years, I believe. Dutch police has been using drones for more than a decade, IR capabilities included for tracking people smuggling and cannabis farms indoors.
I'd believe that most of the police forces in the EU already have some of those, can't see a reason why they wouldn't, it provides you almost the same surveillance capacity as a helicopter without all the expensive equipment and pilot training.
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.
A CPU/ASIC can be seen as an electrical heater with extra steps. So why not heat up your plants with your CPU. The energy flow is: power plant -> CPU -> greenhouse -> the atmosphere
I remember seeing some talk about a company creating ASIC blocks to heat houses but grows afaik don't generally need more heat the lights and everything creates enough heat for the plants.
Just 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]
So 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.
"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.
You'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...
You’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.
(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.
You can measure power movements at a macro scale. So you can see how much energy is being produced by power stations, and how that’s being fed into distribution networks, plus you can sum all the power usage going through end user meters.
All that together give you enough data to pretty accurately estimate stolen power. But not enough data to figure out with any precision where it being stolen. You might know that certain parts of a city are worse that others, but you couldn’t identify the house or even road where it’s happening.
I reckon you can chuck some machine learning at the problem. Sum of all meter readings on the sub network and then measure the power going in. Other variables might be ambient temperature, underground temp, etc.
"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.
In 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.
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.
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.
It might have been profitable 2 months, it's not anymore and soon it will seem silly (when BTC drops below 20k) even until the next bull market comes along.
Crackpot 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.
How 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.
Having 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.
My 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.
Even 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.
Just 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.
Based 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.
A 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).
I 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.)
You have a ton of heat with no power source to generate that heat ... so either they are stealing the electricity or have an illegal power plant of some kind. That is enough for a warrant for the electricity theft. The other evidence leads to their guess on what they think the electricity is being stolen for, but electricity was definitely being stolen.
If the heat is beyond what could be produced by a high-efficiency heat pump and other heat sources, I agree there’s likely PC (and I think I said so, or at least tried to).
> I'm not sure what more you'd reasonably expect to find.
Literally any sort of activity that uses electrical ovens. I can think of dozens of processes for the manufacture of plastic, ceramic and metal items where you're gonna want to bake stuff.
Edit: Apparently it wasn't obvious I was disagree about the assertion that "Based on heat and people coming and going" is normal justification for raiding a pot grow op and not this specific case where a warehouse that is supposedly disconnected is using tons of power.
Also, it seems like a whole lot of people here don't understand that it is very common for facilities to be occupied by a tenant that's not the owner and who doesn't have any signage out front. If you're going in with a preconceived notion that you're looking for a grow op it's really easy to misread things done out of economic convenience as though they were intentional obfuscation.
These activities would certainly be legally incorporated and easy to cross reference.
I also suspect that these ovens don't run 24/7. If they use their drones on a Sunday outside of work hours they can probably weed out (ha) many false positives.
> These activities would certainly be legally incorporated and easy to cross reference.
Facilities are leased and sometimes sub-leased all the time. Just because Joe's T-shirt Printing owns three warehouses doesn't mean they haven't rented one out to a yoga studio and another out to a machine shop.
Just because P&Q Precision Tool exists as a business in state records doesn't mean you have any idea that they're operating out of the Joe's T-Shirt Printing Warehouse that was vacant for the last 3yr.
They don't raid a place based on high electricity consumption or heat alone. They do when this is not expected and suspicious based on other factors as well.
For instance a domestic property or, in this case, a warehouse that officially uses no electricity.
If you rent a warehouse to run your official glass baubles manufacturing business then no-one is going to bat an eyelid about heat or electricity use.
Especially with your big sign out front: "Gloria's Glass Globes" and, also, you'd probably be paying for all that electricity with a check from Gloria's Glass Globes Ltd.
Businesses that are not consumer facing are often far less diligent about signage and advertising than people think.
You'd think one of the largest (legal) indoor grow-ops in my state is a shipping products manufacturer if you went by the sign on the building. The shipping products manufacturer outgrew the building and is leasing it to the pot business. There's a business near me that manufactures medical plastics. Before them the facility was occupied by a company making pasta. Neither has a sign out front. The only difference is the company name on the white box trucks changed.
>They don't raid a place based on high electricity consumption or heat alone.
Sure. But it puts you on the kind of list you don't want to be on and from there there's a good chance they screw you for something stupid because they don't like to come up empty handed after spending resources surveilling you and not finding what they were looking for.
Now you are just going off into weird conspiracy theories. Lots of raids come up empty handed or turn out to have a valid explanation. The police don't have a list of people they want to punish because it turns out they weren't criminals.
>Now you are just going off into weird conspiracy theories
I'm not alleging a conspiracy theory. Those are words you are using to construct an ad-hominum by implying my assertion in in bad company. I'm firmly of the belief that the cops are rational humans responding to incentives.
> Lots of raids come up empty handed or turn out to have a valid explanation
A "raid coming up empty handed" is exactly the failure mode I'm complaining about. The police should be realizing there's no grow-op long before any sort of "raid".
>The police don't have a list of people they want to punish because it turns out they weren't criminals.
I didn't say they did. I said they will routinely prosecute minor stuff they weren't looking for that they normally wouldn't pursue rather than come up empty handed.
I imagine the complete lack of anything actually being shipped into or out of the unit during normal hours was probably a big give away.
Most people when using an industrial unit to bake things, then sell the things they bake. Rather than just piling them up in a corner until the entire unit is full.
If her ovens are rigged to bypass the electricity meters, then yes, she does.
If she had a large bitcoin mining operation going on, and used the profit to pay an electricity bill that was in the right ball park, then the cops would leave her alone.
The heat thing is even more ridiculous, given that farmers have shifted to LED lighting for years now precisely to avoid heat emission that can be picked up by police copters...
Which means that a lot less power input is needed for the same light output, which means less waste heat (should be around 10-20% of the heat an incandescent setup creates).
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.