Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
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.
Kind of weird to think of mining as a way to reduce your carbon emissions but in some cases it certainly can be.
I'll definitely look more into heatpumps when it comes time to replace my furnace or air conditioner, but my understanding is they perform quite poorly in Canadian winters.
I think you are likely mistaken, although it is a surprisingly common misconception. Most places in the world, if you are using an extra kWh of power, the system needs to generate up to an extra marginal kWh from coal or gas.
Example 1: France generates power 70% from nuclear. However if a French person uses an extra kWh during base load, that could easily lead to one less kWh exported, which would most likely mean one extra kWh is generated from say coal somewhere else in Europe.
Example 2: New Zealand generates 60% of power from hydro. If I use an extra kWh of power at the moment (even at cheap rates), then if we have a drought in 6 months time, then an extra kWh needs to be generated from coal in 6 months time. I am presuming the coming critical storm[1] this weekend won’t fill our hydro lakes[2] and that the predicted long term dry weather pattern[0] will occur. I am a New Zealander.
You could be right if you are only using your power when it is cheapest (which usually implies the usage of base load nuclear), although it is surprisingly difficult to actually figure out whether you have generated zero extra carbon.
[0] https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/441393/hydro-power-more-...
[2] https://www.transpower.co.nz/system-operator/security-supply...
[1] https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2021/05/rare-red-...
Edit: on second thoughts in NZ I am sure our lakes can’t fill that quickly from one good storm - the inflow rate is limited by the size of the river and the inflow rate is small compared to the storage size?
While it's true that fossil fuels do provide an important role in variable management of the grid still, this is also accomplished with hydroelectric quite heavily in my area and over time the rates of each production method will adjust accordingly so I think it's still a reasonable assessment to look at overall production.
For example, during any period that the nuclear and hydro are running at capacity. If you reduced your constant power usage by 1kWh then during those peak periods, 1kWh less gas generation would be used by the network.
If your constant 1kWh of electricity would otherwise be exported to the US if you didn't use it, then it could be that 1kWh less coal generation would be used at some times.
Most people find it difficult to think about how their marginal increase in usage very often will cause extra CO2. Even writing this comment down has made me think about how CO2 production also depends on the future predictions of generators. It is complicated, but worth spending time to think about.
If you can get a water-water heat pump you'll be fine for sure (requires drilling a rather deep hole in your backyard tho, so the initial investment is a bit bigger)
Heat pumps don't perform very well, or at all, when it's -30° or -40°, so a secondary heat source is needed. Usually, that will be natural gas, in which case why bother with a heat pump when you can just burn much cheaper natural gas?
In my mind they're just different kinds of heat pumps.
And yeah, drilling is pretty expensive, but once the system is installed, heating is ridiculously cheap. When my parents installed geothermal, ROI was estimated to about 5 years for their house iirc.
But then it may well be that drilling is cheaper here by virtue of being more common, idk.
Except now you have to compare efficiency of your natural gas system vs efficiency of the power plant + electric heater. Chances are that energy efficiency of the power plant + an electric space heater (which is what you're turning your PC into) is smaller than the efficiency of your furnace. Quick googling comes up with energy efficiency of 60% for natural gas powered plants, while I don't think you'll be able to buy a gas furnace that has efficiency smaller than 80% these days...
IIUC, the only way you can mine without worrying about energy usage is if you have electric space heaters in your home - then it doesn't matter if you turn on the PC or the heater. Or if you own solar panels and you are producing more than you are not able to use (or sell).
Have you actually done that calculation out? You say "primarily provided by", but I wonder what that means, given just how much electricity you need to actually heat a home via GPUs.
(You may of course be saving money given the profit you generate, but that's not the same thing as reducing emissions.)
Of course, I'm not heating my entire home with a single GPU, merely offsetting a small portion of my overall heating cost.
It has to be more inefficient as you are not spending energy on calculation but if you substitute it with selling your bitcoins you would need to compensate your co2
edit: quick google -> and here it is :)
So the mining itself doesn't use any energy, it's just that instead of dumping power into a dumb coil of wire, you dump it into a smarter coil of wires and various components that produce some output (that happens to be valuable to the Bitcoin network and it rewards you in exchange) as a side-effect.
For any given watt of electricity, the heat output is the same, just that with a miner you also get useful calculation results out of it.
Heat is the most retrograde form of energy - the form with the most entropy. You can put 100W into a resistor, and you’ll get out 100W of heat. You can put 100W into a lightbulb, and it will generate less than 100W of light and some heat (because it’s not perfectly efficient) but in a room with no windows that light will bounce around until it’s absorbed by the walls and turned into heat so the room will heat up the same as if you had a 100W heater. If you put 100W into a miner, it will mine bitcoins and shed 100W of heat.
Water always runs downhill, energy always follows entropy down into heat.
Edit: Maybe this example will make more sense - consider an old fashioned record player. If the turntable is magnetically levitated, and is in a vacuum chamber, you can spend a tiny amount of energy to spin the table up to 45 rpm, and then (with no needle on the record) it will spin at that speed basically forever, because it's in a frictionless environment (there's no real frictionless environment, of course - you'll need a tiny amount of energy to keep it going). If you have an old turntable from the 70s where all the cheap grease has hardened, then to keep it spinning, the motor will have to do some work. Let's say you're putting 5W in to keep it turning. That 5W is overcoming the friction from the air, and from the old grease, and from the belt drive that runs the turn table. That friction is generating 5W of heat. It has to be, because if it was generating less than 5W of heat then either we'd be using less than 5W to maintain a steady state, or the else the turntable would be accelerating until we were using 5W to maintain a steady state.
Last I checked, heat pumps didn't produce assets of potentially increasing value as a side effect of moving heat around.
It tried to compare it with heat pumps.
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.
It doesn't include Transmission, distribution, taxes or whatever a "Capacity Charge" is.
If you shut off your bitcoin miners during the warmest parts of the day, your capacity charge will go down.
The bill previous was 3.9.
The majority of those fees are fixed cost so don’t scale linearly with usage.
Of course this is moot when you're not paying the bill, as this story says.
Hourly rates/smart meters were not yet available to consumers (commercial customers could get different plans, IIRC).
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).
Maybe you mean that the early holders of Bitcoin have gained more wealth than later adopters or something? I'm not sure what you mean, actually. But that is just how a market works.
Bitcoin is surely pretty far down the list of useful applications of that excess power.
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.
I don't think this is the first time I've read of a substantial change being made to a cryptocurrency. Doesn't this kind of thing completely belie the usual claim that it's free from central control?
> Many are still in denial, hoping there will be "another coin" to mine.
Again I don't follow this stuff that closely, but this doesn't seem absurd on the face of it. Is there a reason to think this won't happen?
It's consensus based, and the core ETH developers have a strong following. There likely will be (and probably already are) forks of ETH that keep proof-of-work, but they'll likely wither off if they don't have a large enough backing behind them.
As I understand it, what actually happens is it 'forks'. Like open source software - anyone free to use it differently or change it dramatically, but most people will stick with the branch maintained most actively or by the original maintainers.
> [There being another coin to mine] doesn't seem absurd on the face of it. Is there a reason to think this won't happen?
There are already loads, so I suppose no, of course it will/already has. The trouble is it needs a high enough valuation (with volume) to support the sunk cost of hardware to anywhere near the extent that Ethereum has for them.
Why would something changing mean it’s centrally controlled? Bitcoin has also undergone changes (although not as big as this one) and it that doesn’t mean it’s not decentralized.
with EIP 1559, those fees will be reduced and also completely burned instead of given to miners.
Instead, miners will receive "tips" from users trying to encourage faster block inclusion.
No one knows how much "tips" will make up for the lost revenue, so it's kind of hard to mount a sizable resistance to the change, in the context of the obvious benefits it conveys to miners by making the currency healthier.
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.
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?
Also not everyone has easy access to an exchange. Others may prefer to avoid the KYC paperwork, or simply be willing to pay a premium for freshly mined coins.
Sure the client might be liable for some loss-of-earnings fees but this really should be better for everyone than this.
Others are FPGAs programmed to compute the hash for whatever cryptocurrency (e.g. BTC is `sha256(sha256(x))`); they can be re-programmed to do something else instead.
Others are ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuits) based, physical chips designed to do nothing else but compute those hashes. So essentially 'no', but 'yes and they'd be very good at it' if you for some reason had another use for that particular hash function (lots and quickly).
That's also a progression of cost & performance, by the way. As the difficulty increases GPUs get slower at finding whatever coin, and people (pay a bit more and) move to FPGAs, and then again to dedicated ASIC hardware.
This is key. You can't "just buy BTC directly" if you don't have cash. Even if you have cash for the initial purchase of crypto, you then have no recurring income. The startup model is again relevant here as you're trading a short term loss, for the potential of a long term gain. Similarly, why don't VC's just invest in profitable, stable companies?
> ...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
If property means physical stuff in one law and thought in another it may become confusing to work out how to follow the law.
It seems that the French high court ruled differently, and they just prosecuted it under the regular theft statute.
Does that imply a drone with infrared capabilities?
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.
Edit: Oh God, it's actually an actual thing that already exists: [1]
[1] https://bitcoinpenny.com/products/the-manhole-cover-physical...
"hey, why's there so much blood on this thing?"
"you don't wanna know"
"I do want to know Tom, I do - enlighten me, where did all this blood come from? Wait a minute, is that hair and bits of brain down here? You don't normally see that kind of thing on coinage of the realm Tom"
on edit: formatting, and made dialog more Ritchiean.
Hey BBC want to hire me as technical consultant for the show
My suspicion is they haven't done upgrades on their systems...
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.
I hope for the sake of their billing department they're using a database and some customized software for the data, but could just as likely be in a large and painful excel spreadsheet.
Power theft is not particularly interesting to the power company unless they're not getting paid for it. If it's just the wrong person paying, that's their problem.
All that together give you enough data to pretty accurately estimate stolen power. But not enough data to figure out with any precision where it being stolen. You might know that certain parts of a city are worse that others, but you couldn’t identify the house or even road where it’s happening.
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.
If they can't then they can also charge the people behind the electricity theft with a bunch of additional crimes about withholding the proceeds of crime, money laundering, refusing to hand over encryption keys, etc. If the operation was unprofitable that doesn't matter either - if the CPS determine you mined, say, 1000BTC then that's what you 'owe'. If you can't pay it then they'll seize your other assets up to that amount. That money is then used to pay the electricity company, government, etc.
The law is very much rigged against you if you're caught.
I agree that it would be a Pareto improvement if such coordination were actually possible, though.
I don’t get it.
So they weren’t just stealing, they were stealing illegally?
The difference between Bitcoin ASICs and GPUs in performance is large enough to make the expenses with these activities not worth the hassle, even if you get the hardware AND the power for free.
edit: i mean it's probably a moot point, mining at 10% efficiency is still worth money if you're tapping electricity from somewhere.
Sounds like more than enough to get a warrant.
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.)
What more do you want here?
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.
I also suspect that these ovens don't run 24/7. If they use their drones on a Sunday outside of work hours they can probably weed out (ha) many false positives.
Facilities are leased and sometimes sub-leased all the time. Just because Joe's T-shirt Printing owns three warehouses doesn't mean they haven't rented one out to a yoga studio and another out to a machine shop.
Just because P&Q Precision Tool exists as a business in state records doesn't mean you have any idea that they're operating out of the Joe's T-Shirt Printing Warehouse that was vacant for the last 3yr.
For instance a domestic property or, in this case, a warehouse that officially uses no electricity.
If you rent a warehouse to run your official glass baubles manufacturing business then no-one is going to bat an eyelid about heat or electricity use.
They will if you're stealing the electricity.
You'd think one of the largest (legal) indoor grow-ops in my state is a shipping products manufacturer if you went by the sign on the building. The shipping products manufacturer outgrew the building and is leasing it to the pot business. There's a business near me that manufactures medical plastics. Before them the facility was occupied by a company making pasta. Neither has a sign out front. The only difference is the company name on the white box trucks changed.
Sure. But it puts you on the kind of list you don't want to be on and from there there's a good chance they screw you for something stupid because they don't like to come up empty handed after spending resources surveilling you and not finding what they were looking for.
I'm not alleging a conspiracy theory. Those are words you are using to construct an ad-hominum by implying my assertion in in bad company. I'm firmly of the belief that the cops are rational humans responding to incentives.
> Lots of raids come up empty handed or turn out to have a valid explanation
A "raid coming up empty handed" is exactly the failure mode I'm complaining about. The police should be realizing there's no grow-op long before any sort of "raid".
>The police don't have a list of people they want to punish because it turns out they weren't criminals.
I didn't say they did. I said they will routinely prosecute minor stuff they weren't looking for that they normally wouldn't pursue rather than come up empty handed.
Most people when using an industrial unit to bake things, then sell the things they bake. Rather than just piling them up in a corner until the entire unit is full.
If she had a large bitcoin mining operation going on, and used the profit to pay an electricity bill that was in the right ball park, then the cops would leave her alone.
Why do you write “Sooo..”
Police suspect a cocaine dealer and raid the place.
However : the dealer was selling heroine.
Flimsy evidence?
What’s your take?
Sounds like farmers need some kind of heat rejection system.