Mining Bitcoin With Phones,Stealing Kilowatts to Mine Peanuts

An electric utility company in China has uncovered an illicit mining operation that was simply not worth the risk. A household in the province of Guangdong was caught stealing electricity to power a bitcoin mining farm at home. The improvised facility was found by workers from the Meizhou municipal branch of the China Southern Power Grid Company. During a routine inspection in Fengshun County they discovered some illegally connected power cables and became suspicious.

The cables ran over a back alley to the upper floor of a residential building. They powered 56 mobile phones and 15 homemade mining rigs, as seen on the photographs posted on the popular Chinese microblogging platform Weibo. According to the South China Morning Post, the equipment has been used to mint bitcoins.

Mining the oldest cryptocurrency is a power-intensive activity. It requires a lot of electricity and needs some serious cooling. Highly specialized hardware handles the enormous number of calculations involved in the processing of bitcoin transactions. The units capable of doing all that are called Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs). It is possible to mine many other cryptos with non-dedicated hardware, but then again powerful graphics processing units (GPUs) are used. Employing mobile phones to mine bitcoin, with their negligible computing power, is not a profitable undertaking.