A group of UK officer who cerebrate they were going to tear up a massive cannabis farm found something entirely different behind the threshold of a local storage warehouse : a regular , legal , bitcoin mine .
practice of law enforcement in West Midlands put outa statementabout the case late Thursday explaining how — at least from the exterior — the mining surgical procedure showed all the “ classical signal ” of a canna - farm . Lots of hoi polloi were “ chatter the unit at different times of day , ” the officers spell , before adding that the storage warehouse had “ tons of wiring and ventilation ducts , ” visible from the outside . When they flew a law drone above the construction , they also find a “ considerable ” amount of heat being given off by whatever was happening inside .
So when they busted the warehouse door down on May 18th , you could belike imagine their surprise when there was n’t a crapper leafage to be find anywhere in the space . What they did discover were roughly 100 specialised bitcoin - mining machines stack atop each other and churning by .
A bitcoin mining rig, not the bitcoin mining rig in question.Photo: Halldor Kolbeins (Getty Images)
“ It ’s sure not what we were expecting ! , ” say Sandwell Police Sergeant Jennifer Griffin in a statement . She said that this was “ only the second such crypto mine , ” that police in the sphere encountered — implying that this is n’t the first time that local officers had been duped .
While cannabis farmingis illegalthroughout the UK , Griffin said that crypto - mining certainly is n’t . Still , the force was able to seize the rig after they regain that the operation was being powered using a monumental amount of steal electricity from nearby construction — and they do n’t contrive on give it back anytime presently . In their statement , the officeholder state that they were looking to “ permanently seize ” the roughly 100 devices under the Proceeds of Crime Act .
The police officer did n’t say how much electricity the surgical operation was stealing , but fortune are it was a whole lot . It takes a gross ton of power to operate a basic mining rig , with onerecent studyfinding that the ordinary energy used to churn out cryptocurrency annually is greater than the Department of Energy use up by countries like Austria and Finland . And in the yesteryear , researchershave foundthat the energy phthisis from crypto - mining is actually way more intensive thanmassive energy drainthat comes with mining genuine precious metals .
Per the police force , nobody was in the unit at the metre of the bust , and no arrests have been made — yet . Suffice to say while the someone who owns the warehouse might be miff that their performance was shut out down , crypto’scurrently immerse pricesmean that they likely did n’t lose out on much .
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