Unauthorised Mining on the Rise; Church in Russia Fined

By Swati Kishore

As per a report, the police has confiscated computing equipment from a building that was rented by a church in Russia. A consequence of which, the concerned authorities ordered the church to pay the electricity bill. However, even though the church paid the bill, it then went on to dispute this in the court. The team at the church argued that the high electricity consumption during the period of May and August 2017 (which was around  two million kWh by August) was caused due to the printing office and the central heating. Even though the church asked for a refund of the electricity bill, unfortunately the court found the fine to be reasonable.

The cryptocurrency market has been attracting a lot of miners, but in the past few years mining on computers at home has become unreasonable. Some people resort to using powerful computers at workplace in order to mine various digital currencies.

It was only in February that the scientists working at the Federal Nuclear Centre, Russia’s  nuclear warhead facility, were arrested for allegedly using a supercomputer at the facility to mine Bitcoins. The surprising fact is that the supercomputer was prohibited from being connected to the internet for the purpose of preventing intrusion and protecting privacy, yet the scientists went on to use it unrestrictedly for the mining of Bitcoins.

The increased interest in cryptocurrency markets entails that potential miners use all sorts of methods to get their slice of the pie by mining for Bitcoins illegally. We can see many more such examples. For example, Florida witnessed the arrest of a State Department employee for the alleged involvement in crypto mining. As per a March report, it was noted that the employee was using the Department of Citrus’ computers to mine for cryptocurrencies such as Litecoin and Bitcoin.

Another example can be taken that of two former Crimean government employees who were fined around USD 530 for the illegal mining of cryptocurrencies using government’s supercomputers. Even after all such repercussions, it appears that the lure of cryptocurrencies is not stopping miners from going every length to procure the equipment even if it belongs to the government!