Principal and Vice Principal Of Chinese School Fired For Secretly Mining Cryptocurrency

By Rishma Banerjee

The South China Morning Post recently reported about how the headmaster and vice principal of a local school in the Hunan province of China were covertly running an operation of mining Ethereum using the school’s computers. This scheme to supposedly get rich quickly backfired due to the interference and of a gutsy school manager who kept on noticing an unusual spike in the electricity consumption at the property.

It seems that they were unable to hide the evidence of the enormous amounts of energy that is required in order to mine cryptocurrencies and since a vast network of computers is now used to mine them, instead of a simple central processing unit, the energy requirements are even more these days.

Eight computers which were the property of the Puman Middle School were used by principal Lei Hua in order to run this clandestine Ethereum mining network, which in turn resulted in an outrageous spike in the electricity bills. Both he and his accomplice, the school’s vice principal were fired from their posts.
The General Manager Lei Mou while describing the rapid increase in electricity consumption, said,

In September electricity consumption was 5640 units; in November electricity consumption was 8130 units.

Hua is assumed to have spent approximately 10,000 yuan, which is equivalent to 1437 USD, in procuring the mining hardware like the graphics card and the multiple processors. This activity also left his former institution of employment with an energy bill in excess of 2000 USD. However, it seems, that these two educators had chosen a pretty bad time to invest in the crypto market, and thus eventually also gamble with their careers. Ethereum, now, in a reflection of the market at large is going through a bearish phase, where it’s prices have fallen by more than 70 per cent from their peak in February. At press time, it is trading at 208.61 USD.