Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-57280115

by frereubu • 5 years ago

205 239 5 years ago

bbc.co.uk

hughrr• 5 years ago

So the police are getting RTX cards this Christmas and we still aren't :(

Hamuko4• 5 years ago

Those are ASICs. Mining Bitcoin on an RTX is untenable.

amelius• 5 years ago

Not if you get electricity for free.

fnord77• 5 years ago

other crapcoins are possible w/ GPUs

https://whattomine.com/

stallmanite• 5 years ago

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.

ccity88• 5 years 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.

cinntaile2• 5 years ago

I don't get your reply? Obviously they're not facing charges for intent to supply drugs because that's not what they did?

sdflhasjd• 5 years ago

Computer equipment getting seized is unusual for electricity theft.

pjc502• 5 years ago

Normally when the police find a large amount of electricity theft it's for drugs, and the "news" in this is that it's for some other purpose.

Hamuko4• 5 years ago

Can they be forced to give up all of the proceeds from their illegal actiivty?

sschueller2• 5 years ago

I think they just need to pay the amount they stole plus penalty.

robin_reala• 5 years ago

The crime is specifically “abstracting electricity”, which is dealt with in the Theft Art 1968. Highest sentence seems to be 5 years imprisonment, but 1 year the normal upper limit: https://www.sentencingcouncil.org.uk/offences/magistrates-co...

josefresco9• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

Yes - they also have IR cameras on police helicopters and use this to identify likely cannabis farms fairly regularly in the UK.

542458• 5 years ago

They’re also useful for search&rescue as well as finding people who are trying hide in foliage, but yeah.

andylynch• 5 years ago

Possibly. But it could also be something as simple as a snow free roof when the neighbourhood is covered. Or one unusually dry after rain.

sschueller2• 5 years ago

DJI 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

[2] https://www.dji.com/ch/mavic-2-enterprise

deepserket2• 5 years ago

yes, ir cameras are widely used in helicopters, eg. https://youtu.be/Q481RMKwpCY?t=45 it's a no brainer to mount them on drones too

tsukikage• 5 years ago

...one has to wonder also why they needed to keep visiting the place once they set everything up.

deepserket2• 5 years ago

yeah, and lots of people... i don't know

tgsovlerkhgsel4• 5 years ago

Maybe they were still setting up?

piva00• 5 years ago

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.

NovemberWhiskey• 5 years ago

Drones with thermal cameras (usually for firefighting, search-and-rescue and electrical inspection) have been around for a little while.

nuclearnice14• 5 years ago

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.

Hamuko4• 5 years ago

Didn't they raid the place because they knew that they were stealing electricity?

nuclearnice14• 5 years ago

Good point it sounds like the had a tip about that and some follow up with Western Power Distribution.

Ensorceled6• 5 years ago

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).

Sounds like more than enough to get a warrant.

sokoloff2• 5 years ago

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.)

pjc502• 5 years ago

Entirely normal evidence for raiding cannabis farms. I'm not sure what more you'd reasonably expect to find.

throwaway0a5e5• 5 years ago

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.

mschuster912• 5 years ago

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...

scatters2• 5 years ago

The power still ends up as heat; LEDs just mean that less of it is wasted.

jhgb• 5 years ago

to avoid heat emission that can be picked up by police copters

Sounds like farmers need some kind of heat rejection system.

the-dude• 5 years ago

Lots of traffic to a flat, neighbours complaining.

Police suspect a cocaine dealer and raid the place.

However : the dealer was selling heroine.

Flimsy evidence?

Humdeee• 5 years ago

The 'ol switcheroo.

nuclearnice14• 5 years ago

I vote flimsy. Lots of people get many visitors. Right?

What’s your take?

kleiba• 5 years ago

I say: combine the two (cannabis farming and bitcoin mining)!

dcolkitt• 5 years ago

Proof-of-Chillness

bryanrasmussen3• 5 years ago

There has got to be a British Gangster movie in this somewhere!

Joker_vD2• 5 years ago

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]

[1] https://bitcoinpenny.com/products/the-manhole-cover-physical...

Mauricebranagh4• 5 years ago

Tommy Shelbys Grandsons and Greatgrand sons :-)

Hey BBC want to hire me as technical consultant for the show

scatters2• 5 years ago

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.

Havoc• 5 years ago

Residential heating would work

darkcha0s• 5 years ago

Just scalp enough 3090's with RGB lighting and you might just have enough light/wattage to grow

FredPret• 5 years ago

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

de6u99er• 5 years ago

Cannabis farming would be much easier and cost effective if it could be done out in the open.

elif2• 5 years ago

Winter greenhouse farming.

bserge3• 5 years ago

How to upgrade your sentence from a fine to prison time 101 :D

jaymzcampbell• 5 years ago

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstracting_electricity

Tomte• 5 years ago

The same problem and solution in Germany, but already in 1900: 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_vD2• 5 years ago

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.

igravious• 5 years ago

Very good point.

koheripbal• 5 years ago

There's no "master" set of definitions in law. Every law has its own definitions. So contrary definitions are irrelevant.

Mauricebranagh4• 5 years ago

Stealing her Majesties electricity back in the day

derekp7• 5 years ago

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.

robjan• 5 years ago

That would be the crime of "Making off without payment"

_joel2• 5 years ago

Those ASIC's look old, however if you're not paying for power then it's all profit.

santamex• 5 years ago

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.

I don’t get it.

Mauricebranagh4• 5 years ago

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.

notacoward• 5 years ago

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.

sandwell• 5 years ago

Nothing to do with me >.>

phire3• 5 years ago

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.

alex_young• 5 years ago

Isn’t that entirely dependent on your electrical rate? There must be some break even point right?

phire3• 5 years ago

That 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.

bluGill5• 5 years ago

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.

0xfaded• 5 years ago

Man, I was hoping some graphics cards would be liquidated to cover the losses.

MaxBarraclough2• 5 years ago

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.

josefresco9• 5 years ago

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?

scrollaway2• 5 years ago

If you have cash, mining is unprofitable, and you want btc, there's a more profitable solution you're not seeing here.

why_only_15• 5 years ago

If you have to pay $50k in electricity to mine a $40k bitcoin, it would be better to just turn off the mine and buy the bitcoin directly.

paulcole2• 5 years ago

If you’re spending $1500 to mine $1000 in BTC and are bullish about the future of BTC, why not just buy $1500 of BTC?

rtkwe3• 5 years ago

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.

Black1012• 5 years ago

Free electricity is not a thing in your world?

rideontime• 5 years ago

Of course not. In what world is electricity free?

drewg1232• 5 years ago

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.

RobLach• 5 years ago

As opposed to storing it?

tablespoon• 5 years ago

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).

bialpio5• 5 years ago

Would be way more profitable if they figured out some way to re-sell what electricity they stole...

therein• 5 years ago

Yeah man, they should have just pushed those electrons back into the interconnect after they ran them through their miners.

quickthrower25• 5 years ago

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.

deanclatworthy• 5 years ago

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.

knorker2• 5 years ago

I'm shocked, SHOCKED, to see organized crime committing crimes.

Mauricebranagh4• 5 years ago

Bit odd the Cops didn't wait intel the premises had visitors inside would could have been arrested.

onionisafruit• 5 years ago

I would be curious to know how much mining is done using stolen electricity.

geuis• 5 years ago

It’s pretty obvious isn’t it? Plug mining rigs into someone else’s power outlet.

quickthrower25• 5 years ago

How much was asked. Not how.

boringg2• 5 years ago

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...

avianlyric3• 5 years ago

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.

boringg2• 5 years ago

Counter - How do you know the level of loss if you don't have visibility into it?

gberger• 5 years ago

What is a "Sandwell Bitcoin mine"?

jasoncartwright• 5 years ago

It's a bitcoin mine in Sandwell, England

imtringued• 5 years ago

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.

paulgb• 5 years ago

Because 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.

quickthrower25• 5 years ago

This might be how the more centralised coins like Ripple and IOTA work

linsomniac• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

A suspected Bitcoin "mining" operation illegally stealing electricity […]

So they weren’t just stealing, they were stealing illegally?

Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

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