> Setting up a mining farm with hundreds of free stolen GPUs isn't easy or cheap at all.

Still significantly cheaper than setting up a mining farm with hundreds of legally obtained GPUs.

GPUs are the expensive part of a mining operation.

Seeds are cheap (~$10 USD/ea), whole ready to harvest plants are not (and hard-ish to estimate). If you grow inside the expensive part is the electricity. Indoor and outdoor both spend lots on labour for harvest/cure/trim processes (variable cost, hourly). Expensive equipment are things like CO2 extractors $XXX,XXX USD. So yea, seeds cheap, loads of other higher cost items to get ~$10/g flower on the shelf at your favourite retailer

North America is literally the best market for this, we have the most robust and efficient mining market and supply routes. One level of efficiency is that large scale mining operations allow for space leases and profit sharing at their data centers. If you wanted to fire off a message saying “I have a bunch of GPUs” they will give you a quote about their terms.

Several of these companies are publicly traded its really not that hard to get done.

Once you move past the Internet forums debating the existence of this market, try actually research this market its very fast paced and robust.

Because GPUs are small and easy to transport?

Just like with setting up a weed farm. The cops need to follow spikes in power consumption that are out of the ordinary and they'll find you. However, growing weed may be illegal in most places, mining is not yet.

It'd be more efficient to just fence the cards. There are so many communities of flippers / eager buyers out there that it would take minutes to move an entire truckload of 30 series GPUs to buyers of all types.