Employees of the local headquarters of the National Police in Rivne, Ukraine have been mining cryptocurrency at work, local news outlet 368.media reports today, May 22. Citing materials from criminal proceedings, 368.media reports that employees of the local Police’s Communications Department have been accused of stealing electricity to mine cryptocurrency in the workplace. The unnamed employees were allegedly mining cryptocurrency at work for four months. 368.Media notes that it is yet unclear how much electricity was reportedly stolen or what kind of cryptocurrency was being mined. 368.Media writes that employees at the National Police’s Department for Internal Security found cryptocurrency …
The electricity mix of Bitcoin (BTC) has drastically changed over the past few years, with nuclear energy and natural gas becoming the fastest growing energy sources powering Bitcoin mining, according to new data. The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) on Tuesday released a major update to its Bitcoin mining-dedicated data source, the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (CBECI). According to the data from Cambridge, fossil fuels like coal and natural gas made up almost two-thirds of Bitcoin’s total electricity mix as of January 2022, accounting for more than 62%. As such, the share of sustainable energy sources in the …
Police in China arrested 22 suspects allegedly involved in illegal crypto mining activity that led to energy loss worth of about $3 million, reports XinhuaNet, the official press agency of China, on July 12. Police in Jiangsu, China’s eastern-central coastal province, have reportedly seized 4,000 hardware units that were illegally used to mine cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin (BTC) at nine factories. According to the report, Jiangsu police launched a criminal investigation after a local power firm reported an abnormal spike in electricity consumption. After almost two months of investigation, the police in the city of Zhenjiang in Jiangsu detected a …
A man in China has been been sentenced to three and a half years in jail for stealing power from a train station to fuel his Bitcoin (BTC) mining operations, local media outlet The Paper reports October 8. According to court documents released today, the sentencing was served September 13 at the Datong Railway Transport Court in China’s northern Shanxi province. In addition to jail time, the individual, a local named Xu Xinghua, has reportedly been fined 100,000 yuan (around $14,500). Xinghua is said to have stolen electricity from one of the factories at Kouquan Railway back in November and …
The energy usage and environmental impact of Bitcoin (BTC) mining have been frowned upon and been under the scanner by various international financial institutions. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) mentions how Bitcoin mining consumes “vast amounts of computing power and electricity.” Bitcoin mining is an energy-consuming process, as it is a proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain network that involves providing cryptographic proof to the network that a quantified amount of a specific computational effort has been used. The information used to verify this is stored in a block to be accepted into the network by other participants. Elon Musk, one of the …