The fight against the mining of cryptocurrencies continues with full force. It is a well-known fact that the mining of Bitcoin and other digital coins drains a huge amount of electricity and this cost often comes at the expense of the respective government.
While in China it’s no longer a crime to found mining operations, stealing energy is illegal. The fact that miner steal energy to power the “always-hungry” mining computers.
According to press, around 7,000 crypto mining computers and 50 high-powered transformers were confiscated in the Kaiping District of Tangshan city by Chinese authorities. The investigation was started in April 2018. Back then, the State Electric Power Department, the Tangshan police and other authorities searched around 70,000 homes, 3,000 merchants, mines, factories, villages and more than 1,400 communities for allegedly using electricity in a “questionable” manner.
How the authorities managed to understand which businesses and households to search was the amount of electricity used. The mining computers operated 24 hours and were using around 40x more than what the average household uses for consumption needs. Most miners are stealing the needed electricity from villages.
So far, the Chinese authorities have confiscated 1,906 bitcoin mining machines, and after that 790 more. The total number of seized machines is 6,890.
The mining activities in China account for roughly 60% of Bitcoin’s total global hash rate (10% comes from Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Yunnan, while 50% comes from Sichuan). China was long pondering on whether to ban mining operations, but this did not happen.