Increased Power Usage Leads to Mistaken Pot Busts for Bitcoin Miners

c0lo writes "The Canadian town of Mission, BC has a bylaw that allows the town's Public Safety Inspection Team to search people's homes for grow ops if they are using more than 93 kWh of electricity per day. There have allegedly been reports floating in IRC of two different cases of police showing up at a Bitcoin miner's residence with a search warrant. Ohio police and the DEA file at least 60 subpoenas each month for energy-use records of people suspected of running an indoor pot growing operation. DEA Agent Anthony Marotta said high electricity usage does not always mean the residence is an indoor pot farm and has surprised federal agents. 'We thought it was a major grow operation ... but this guy had some kind of business involving computers. I don't know how many computer servers we found in his home.'"

Comments

Shut up with the bitcoin stories

[Sycraft-fu]

Seriously, this is getting annoying. Editors, you guys need to knock it off. The bitcoin fanatics are using you as an advertising push. It is getting annoying. Leave off it already.

Re:Shut up with the bitcoin stories

[cyberworm]

While I can see your annoyance at the recent spade of bitcoin articles, this is interesting outside of bitcoin. What if you had a beowulf clusters or stacks of machines running folding or other, arguably, more useful applications. High energy usage or a sudden spike in power consumption shouldn't be probable cause in and of itself.

I dread to think what would happen if a sudden and consistent spike in energy usage were probable cause where I live. I went two years without a television, with my main drains on electricity being my laptop, speakers, and my fridge. Once I picked up an older 50" plasma monitor and started playing my PS3 I noticed a considerable increase in cost/use. Should I have my door kicked in because I might be growing weed, even though the reality is much more innocuous (smoking weed and playing video games)?

Re:Shut up with the bitcoin stories

[billcopc]

Pragmatically, this whole ordeal should be a non issue. If people want to grow pot in their homes, let them. Big fuckin' deal!

The only reason pot is so demonized is because it's easy to identify and prosecute. It is, by far, the least damaging "drug" in the western world. I'm way more worried about getting a heart attack from too much Advil, unsurprisingly due to the stress caused by all these conservative idiots trying to tell people how to live their lives. The pothead next door, while annoying with his brain-damanged music tastes and lack of valuable employment, is far less harmful to my existence than the trillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry that wants me to be sick 24-7 so I can consume their overpriced filth.

I think the Bitcoin thing is a very short-lived fad. The more people get in on it, the less valuable it becomes. The guy who's getting raided this week, well next week would have dropped out anyway once the mining "difficulty" doubles and he's suddenly spending more on hydro and Radeon 5970's than he's getting back in funny money. Big whoop!

Funniest thing is...

[Bieeanda]

They spent more on those machines, and on the electricity to run them, than they ever will 'mining' bitcoins.

mine bitcoins then grow pot?

[wmbetts]

So if you want to grow pot mine a bunch of bitcoins and get the police to inspect your house. Once that's done setup your grow operation, because the suspicion has been relieved?

Has this actually happened?

[artor3]

"Rumors floating around IRC" strikes me as somewhere between Fox News and Homeless Guy on Street Corner in terms of credibility. This is exactly the sort of story that someone would make up as a joke, and people would repeat as though it's real.

Read the article

[Sycraft-fu]

The first four paragraphs are nothing but gushing about bitcoins, no mention of the bust at all. The 5ths finally makes a mention of the power thing and then there's a bit of talk about the alleged bust from the wonderfully reliable source of "IRC". Then more shit about how bitcoin is a cool "P2P" currency then a video about bitcoins.

The fucking thing is a bitcoin promotion and just more of the "Oh look at how awesome and scary it is!" crap. I have serious doubts the event in question ever happened. This is astroturfing.

Any journalist will tell you that you lead with the most important stuff. Each subsequent paragraph is less likely to be read. So if this was about rights and a real event the first paragraph would go more along the lines of:

"What was supposed to be a bust for a pot growing operation went wrong for police when the discovered a house with nothing but a large number of computers working overtime. Police obtained a warrant for the house of $some_guy due to energy company records showing an unusually high amount of usage, often a sign of a marijuana growing location. However no drugs were found, instead just mean computers which were engaged in a process called 'bitcoin mining."

Then maybe a paragraph about bitcoins, then one about drug ops and power usage and so on. That it starts with bitcoins and goes for 5 paragraphs tells you that the article is all about that, not the supposed rights issue.

Re:Bitcoins as currency

[petermgreen]

Right which brings us to the key difference between bitcoin and regular government money.

Government money has value because you HAVE to use it to deal with the government and dealing with the governement is basically unavoidable. Many private sellers don't take anything other than government money (or bank credits that are effectively equivilent to government money) either.

OTOH bitcoins can only be spent at a relatively small number of places most of which take government currency (or bank credits that are effectively equivilent to government currency) as well. So there is far more chance of it becoming worthless in a relatively short time. Especially if governments start trying to crack down on users.