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.

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.

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.