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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.'"
Dude's probably buying drugs with his bitcoins.
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Better use of the electicity
You realize this was in Canada, right? High power consumption alone is insufficient to obtain a search warrant in the United States.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
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.
They spent more on those machines, and on the electricity to run them, than they ever will 'mining' bitcoins.
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?
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me". - stolen from Dan C alt.os.linux.slackware
Second word of the summary is Canadian...
You realize this was in Canada, right? High power consumption alone is insufficient to obtain a search warrant in the United States.
If you had read all the way to the third sentence, you would have seen:
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.
Ohio is part of the US, and the DEA is a US Federal agency.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
"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.
Canada has a bill of rights too, and a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, both of which are focused on protecting personal property from unreasonable search and seizure.
But it looks like using "too much" power automatically means somebody is treated like a criminal and subject to being searched to prove otherwise.
Great, just great. I can see the calls for banning solar energy technology since it allows drug lords to escape detection via electric meters.
Just imagine the rhetoric: "Only pot-farmers use solar energy." "Support HB123 to place export controls on drug energy technology to Mexico!" "Off grid, on drugs!" "Tell the police if your neighbor has gone wireless!"
It is a scam. The bitcoin production difficulty is exponential, so the first few people who designed the system easily produced a big percentage of the total possible bitcoins (Over 6 million out of the total 21 million scheduled to be produced until the year 2140 are already taken) and now they are doing everything they can to give them value. So, those that "accept" bitcoins as currency are those that have a vested interest in them gaining value.
Basically you are using more and more power for the chance to produce a virtual "coin", so you are not producing value, just hurting the environment and if enough stupid people follow your example you will make a few scammers rich.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
As I understand it, the process doesn't create anything of inherent value, but it serves to limit supply - same way that gold is difficult to find and mine, is of limited industrial use (and thus limited intrinsic value), and tends to just sit around in vaults once it's been refined, but is still traded and invested in.
The key difference, of course, is that the value of gold has more 'inertia' since there are far, far more people who buy into the notion that gold has value. Bitcoin is pretty volatile because there are far fewer people with a vested interest (in the most literal sense of the term) in its maintained value, and because people find it easier to accept the value of a shiny metal with thousands of years of history than that of a cryptographically signed set of data.
Three Bitcoin articles on the front page in as many weeks? Sure, this one is a bit sideways, but seriously, the number of people involved with Bitcoin is insignificantly small and should remain that way. Stop hyping this project which is either an ill-fated experiment or a scam.
But seriously, this is the kind of thing that has really killed the world. Here we have a weed that is one of the most perfect and useful plants in existence. Because of fundamentalist faith based lawmaking and general greed it is banned for most purposes. Of course some would say that it damages kids, but how about the legal drugs? The Pfizer commercials tells kids they can only be happy with drugs. Someone like Rush Limbaugh can afford to be a prescription drug addict, and maybe old people in the US with medicare part D, but the average person has to go with the unregulated stuff. It would be nice if kids were not told that drug use is good, and I certainly believe that drug use in general is a losing game, but there we have it. Corporate drugs good, plants are bad.
On top of the insanity of jailing people for growing plants or using plants simply because that plant has not been awarded the special corporate status of tabacco, is just the beginning. So we now have these indoor operation using huge amounts of dirty power that contributes god knows how much to global warming, killing the future even for the kids that aren't addicted to Zoloft. All this waste because growers are forced indoors. Of course in canada part of the problem is the short growing season, but really, it is arguable that the time of the police would be better spent arresting doctors for frivolously doping kids so that they don't annoy their parents.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Why should the police be involved?
Though not surprising to see such comment ... many people have become conditioned to the police state and not fully aware of how omnipresent it is around them.
Seems to me the only people who should be asking questions, if anyone, regarding 3X average household usage would be the power utility to ensure the customer is aware of it and is able to pay.
And perhaps, especially in older developments / rural areas, sending out a utility tech to verify the drop and transformer are up to the task - likely there's going to be plenty of extra capacity available and hence no issues.
Ron
I'm going to repeat the comment I made on the Time story covering this 2 hours ago:
I hate to tell you, but it never happened. This is an AMD TV commercial (available on Youtube) saying, basically, run Nvidia and get raided for running a pot growing operation due to excessive power usage.
Oh, and a side note, in the US, the power companies DO regularly report users with sudden spikes of excessive power usage that are indicative of grow ops. This data is volunteered by the power companies, and the police do not need a warrant to collect it.
Patrick "Diablo-D3" McFarland || http://AdTerrasPerAspera.com
The same way running a press to 'make' currency produces anything of value. It doesn't. The machine makes the item, but the value comes from us.
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It's an attempted end-run around obtaining a search warrant, which would require more than just higher than average power consumption. The way it works is the municipality sends a bylaw inspector to a home for a "safety inspection" after someone notices that the power consumption at the residence is higher than it should be.
The inspector can't force his way in, but a bit of bullying and a stern "What have you got to hide?" or "I'll come back with a warrant and make your week difficult" is often all that's necessary, especially if the homeowner in question isn't actually doing anything wrong, and isn't used to dealing with stuff like this. The inspector brings along a police escort for "safety and security." Convenient.
The inspector looks around, and if he finds a grow op, well, hey, lookee here, the police just happened to be down the hall! Now they don't need a search warrant because it wasn't "a police search."
If the inspector finds nothing illegal, he (often but not always) presents the homeowner in question with a bill for the inspection, which can range from $5k to $10k.
Good news though: A few days ago, the BC Supreme Court has issued a giant "fark you" to the practice:
Article
You should only have enough electricity for your Television to watch IDOL, FOX and CNN and that is all!!
Anything more and you are a terrorist!!!!
We will send the TSA immediately into your home to grab your balls, your breasts or open your kids diapers!!!!
That will show everyone that we just need to keep people safe to stop these terrorists!!!
Mr. Goldstein is _everywhere_ but with your sacrifices we _WILL_ _GET_ _HIM_!!!
Report anything you see to your local threat fusion center immediately!!!
Keep an eye on your neighbors so we can keep you safe!
-DHS
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
I think it's high time we think about extending the 2nd amendment (Right to bear arms), to include technology.
I know they're not busting in to raid a Bitcoin factory, but that doesn't mean they wont in the future.
I'm a coder, and occasionally I write ciphers. Lately I wrote a block cipher system that takes any hash algo, data stream, and a pass-phrase, and produces encrypted output via a type of Cipher Block Chaining on hash-length sized blocks (MD5=160bit, SHA1=256bit, SHA512=512bit encryption, and beyond; Bonus, any new hash comes out, implement it and bingo, stronger encryption).
I came very close to being in violation of federal law when I posted my program on my blog. Fortunately a friend told me that my program was considered extremely dangerous to the government, and that if anyone outside of the US downloaded it, I could be heavily fined and/or jailed. I immediately removed the code, and checked the server logs; Fortunately only my friend had downloaded it.
I didn't know that all strong encryption ciphers have to be registered with the US government (like firearms!? -- Strength at or above 64bit symmetric or 768 asymmetric, or 128 for elliptic curve), and that export of software that can perform encryption must be approved by the government before you put it online, or else it could be considered trafficking illegal controlled software.
I was told by some that if your code was open source, you could just fill out a form, and you were pre-approved, but I don't think that's the case anymore.
I've been tinkering with ciphers since I was 10 -- I don't think anyone outside the US got a hold of my tinker-code, but who knows? We swapped code at HAL-PC SIG's all the time...
With today's government's lack of respect for our freedoms and esp. digital privacy, I think it's time we added the right to bear technology & math, esp. cryptography to the Bill of Rights.
Hey, If I can be prosecuted for distributing my ciphers under the "munitions export restrictions" laws, then does that mean I already can assert my 2nd amendment privileges to USE MY PC TO TWIDDLE BITS? Does freedom of speech (1st amendment) not give me the right to post some byte-code hex to my blog? (Looks like it's illegal to sell your Beowulf Cluster on Ebay too.)
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 $some_guy due to energy company records showing an unusually high amount of usage, often a sign of a marijuana growing location. However no drugs were found, instead just mean computers which were engaged in a process called 'bitcoin mining."
Then maybe a paragraph about bitcoins, then one about drug ops and power usage and so on. That it starts with bitcoins and goes for 5 paragraphs tells you that the article is all about that, not the supposed rights issue.
It doesn't. It creates a medium of exchange that all players on the network agree upon, and cannot change unilaterally.
You think your US government backed cash has any actual value to it? It has as much (or as little) value as the people who hold it believe it does. Same with bitcoins. It's effectively a cryptographically secure, peer-to-peer financial system. It doesn't contain value, just like no monetary system since the gold standard actually contained value.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Right which brings us to the key difference between bitcoin and regular government money.
Government money has value because you HAVE to use it to deal with the government and dealing with the governement is basically unavoidable. Many private sellers don't take anything other than government money (or bank credits that are effectively equivilent to government money) either.
OTOH bitcoins can only be spent at a relatively small number of places most of which take government currency (or bank credits that are effectively equivilent to government currency) as well. So there is far more chance of it becoming worthless in a relatively short time. Especially if governments start trying to crack down on users.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Now people will be growing pot inside computer cases. lol
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=pc+stealth+grow+box
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
Look, I'm not going to argue on whether or not marijuana should or should not be legal. Let's just accept (for this argument) that it is, and continue on the presumption that stopping a crime is, in and of itself, a worthy goal.
/. on issues like this. But sometimes, /. gets too caught up in it's own hatred of the establishment, and starts taking irrational positions. Blindly hating anything involving the police is just as bad as blindly defending anything involving the police.
Let's also assume that "exceptionally high electric usage" has a correlation (but not causation) with said illegal activity.
There is a huge fucking difference between "getting a search warrant" and "asking some questions". Get this straight. Not every cop is a power-obsessed Nazi just waiting for the chance to oppress everyone. Most of them, surprisingly enough, are human beings, not monsters. There's laws. They enforce them. Most laws, in fact, are just laws - murdering people is wrong, robbing people is wrong, raping people is wrong, all the way down to "playing music way too loud at four in the morning and causing a disturbance" being wrong.
Knocking on someone's door and asking a few questions ("We noticed your power bill was kinda high, we were just checking to make sure you knew. You happen to be doing anything really electricity-heavy? Arc welding? Homemade tesla coils?") is pretty much justified when you have something generally suspicious. It would be like "that driver just veered rather erratically, there's a decent chance he's drunk, might want to go check".
This is, of course, predicated on police, too, following the principles of the law. Refusing to talk to police in this case should not be evidence of anything other than not liking to talk to police. If that gets used as justification to later come back with a warrant, that's not good. Don't like that. But a polite status check is arguably a good thing - it lets any misunderstandings get cleared up before anything remotely serious happens, and it would probably be enough to get some exceptionally wasteful people to start using less electricity.
Now, understand this: I do not like how the police have become in the US. Or elsewhere, actually. There's many, many cases where police are clearly and flagrantly violating laws. There are far too many judges issuing free search warrants, far too many laws being misused, and more unjust laws than should be tolerated. Normally, I side with
If this ever does become a full-on police state, I'll be one of the first to grab my rifle, fill up some molotovs, and start taking back our rights. But until then, let's be reasonable - on both sides.
That's why when you get pulled over by a cop the first thing is not to reach for you license and registration but to shut off your engine, roll up your windows and prepare to get out of your car with your license and registration. once out you lock your car. The police can't break and enter your car but if you have the windows open they are are allowed to make shit up to stick their head in the car or search. leagaly speaking if your stopped by the cops and have your window open you have forfeited your right to demand a search warrant can be more easily seen or searched. same with being asked to open the trunk of your car, you need to ask them if they have a warrant first.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqMjMPlXzdA&feature=related
It would be something similar to Paypal, just without somebody telling you what you can do or can't (poker) do with your money. Also nobody can freeze your account. Also, free or very low transaction fees.
Also, you can't buy them directly from a company, you have to use trading exchanges to buy and sell them, so the price fluctuates.
If you accept Paypal as something you can use to buy stuff with, you can accept bitcoin, or at least I don't wee why not.
You do realise the penny isn't the only currency, right?
A $100 bill does not cost more than $100 to make.
"The bitcoin production difficulty is exponential"
Difficulty can go down as well.
Production difficulty is not set by anybody, it is just that right now bitcoin is becoming very popular so lost of people are mining. In fact, production of bitcoins is linear, 50 bitcoins each 10 minutes or so on average, but this will go down every 4 years. Nothing exponential about it.
Would you say e-gold was a scam as well? About $600 million was put into e-gold until US government shut it down. Only difference is that bitcoin is p2p, and thus, similar to bittorrent, unstoppable.
It all sounds like BS to me. Basically the crypto is just acting as a "proof of work" to limit the currency supply and make forgery difficult, but there's plenty of ways this could be done without the CPU cycles.
Plenty of ways? Name one.
Bitcoin does it in a distributed fashion, without central authority. When I read about how it all works, I thought it was ingenious.
One issue is that it's illegal in the US to create ones own currency, and I'd wager that it's not just the US that takes that view. Prior to that being made federal law, states and even banks would have their own currency leading to all sorts of confusion. Gift cards get a bit of a free pass in that they're sold and drawn upon legal tender and really just represent a promissory note.
Additionally, because of the way that the system is set up, it looks a bit too much like a Ponzi scheme for my comfort. There's something unsettling about a currency which isn't based upon anything tangible and that doesn't come with any claims or guarantees about getting to use it either.
Does it produce anything of lasting value? If not, it's a scam.
No sig for the moment.
You could make the exact same argument against alcohol. Alcohol is way more harmful than pot, both in terms of addiction, and in terms of overdosing.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
that argument only works if
1: it being illegal actually prevents people just getting high all day
2: throwing them in prison was less harmful/costly to society than accepting that lifestyle.
there are other options of course, you could legalise it but have mandatory rehabilitation classes or something that tries to get them back into the workforce, which would probably have low success rates but be spectacularly more useful than throwing them in jail.
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
> "Falkvinge from pirate bay party"
You realize you're not helping your argument with that, don't you?
It produces an ability to send "money" around for a very low cost. And as long as somebody is willing to buy them from you, bitcoins will have value.
If it's a scam, price on exchanges will go to zero, and you will have digital play money to send around.
Then, perhaps some multi-player online game will start to use it and price will again rise from zero to 0.01 per bitcoin, perhaps more.
After all, people are buying Zynga poker chips that you can never cash out. And Eve ISKs, and Wow gold.
The name of that online game for bitcons will be called "Economy online."
"How are they going to compel people into accepting them?"
Pokerstars and Full Tilt Poker will start to accept bitcoins, so that even people that are not part of the free world could play.
Anyone owed a debt in the US (for instance), must accept US dollars as payment. That's what the notice "this note is legal tender for all debts, public and private" means on dollars. The same is not true for bitcoins--I can freely refuse payment in bitcoins, and the government can do nothing about it. That's a large component of the reason why people like dollars.
When alcohol was made legal again in the US it reduced a lot of violent crime. Today pot is involved in a lot of violent crime, smoking dope is by no means a victimless crime. So I can see that legalizing it could solve some problems.
However we still have laws and regulations about alcohol, it's not a "sell and drink all you want" anarchy. So if pot were legalized it would also be highly regulated and monitored (and thus not the libertarian dream it seems at first glance).
What it produces in an ability that I can send you "something" from my computer to your computer without any central authority, so that you can be sure that I don't have that same thing anymore. And I can't cheat.
If you think about it, it is an interesting problem, because, how can you be sure that I indeed do not have that "something" on my computer. What happens if, after I send you that "something", I restore my computer from backup?
That is what the application produces, and that is what have value for some people, because, it basically becomes electronic cash, that mimics the real world gold, without the hassle of the real gold, and also without real world uses that actual gold has.
I saw some of the comments saying that the article reads like an advertisement for bitcoin, so I took a look. Holy crap! They even embedded a promotional video for bitcoin in the article. The bitcoin guys are really, really trying to make millions off this, and they're obviously pushing these pseudo-news-articles to drum up fame and fortune. And, just to be clear, the claim that the police raided a home was based on a rumor seen on an IRC chat ("Blogger Mike Esspe captured an IRC chat that supports the rumor floating around that at least one bitcoin miner has been arrested."). Uh huh. That's news now. And despite the claim that "at least one bitcoin miner has been arrested", the IRC chat actually says the police showed up, looked around, and left. Apparently, "has been arrested" has a totally new meaning in the pseudo-news-article world of bitcoin.
All drugs should be legal.
Who backs bitcoins?
The network of computers running the Bitcoin software (and in particular, the (alleged) cryptographic security of its algorithms).
How are they going to compel people into accepting them?
They aren't. Nobody is going to compel anyone to do anything.
People might voluntarily choose to accept bitcoins for their own reasons, however.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Smoking dope is victimless. Acquiring it is a nightmare.
Legalization solves the acquisition problem. Personally, I don't smoke, but I have absolutely no problem with someone who smokes recreationally - a lot of my friends do, and that's perfectly OK by me. To me, alcohol is just another recreational drug, and they should all be treated the same. Anyone can choose to allow drugs to dominate and destroy their well-being, and legality has no influence on that behaviour. I'd rather have someone get chilled on pot, than high on violent greed as we're seeing in many big american cities. At least the stoner just chills out in his living room, appreciating music :)
-Billco, Fnarg.com
They started caring when every inspection began to net them 5000 dollars. If I could get $5000 for knocking on doors and harrassing people, no one from here to Pacoima would be safe...
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
The fact that nobody can effectively freeze your account/restrict who you send money to is, IMO, one of the main strengths of Bitcoin. Think of stuff like Wikileaks losing paypal.
There's also the fact that transfers are one way (no withdrawals). People can't take bitcoins from you, only you decide what to do with it.
Thank you. Finally someone else who sees bitcoin for what it really is.
It's an elaborate ponzi scheme designed to generate insane interest at the very beginning (due to people starting getting crazy amounts of BTC).. in turn these people become huge vested in increasing bitcoin's value.. so much so that they becomes fanatics and thus you see stories like this EVERYWHERE these days... more interest is generated by seeing people with 1000s of coins and a $7 exchange rate, leading to a huge influx of more people looking to generate coins, so on and so forth
i've said it before and i'll say it again
In the beginning of BTC mining, the FEW people who programmed/used their own personal GPU miners on huge farms (while everyone else was still using CPU) are the only ones who are going to benefit (See more that a couple thousand dollars) from this crap... everything else is just increasing value for these guys.
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
You think your US government backed cash has any actual value to it? It has as much (or as little) value as the people who hold it believe it does.
This is incorrect because of taxation. By taxation, the government forces a debt nominated in US$ on you. This implies that you have to get US$ from somebody else. Thus demand for US$ is created, giving them value.
Almost everybody believes that the US government taxes people so that they get money to spend. This is completely false, however. Think about it: the US government is the one who *creates* the US$. Saying that they need income from taxes to be able to pay out US$ is as silly as saying that Blizzard needs income from somewhere in order to be able to pay out WoW gold.
The primary purpose of taxes is to remove purchasing power from the private sector, to create a gap in aggregate demand that can then be used for inflation-free government spending. You may be interested in some of Prof. Mitchell's writing on Modern Monetary Theory, starting e.g. here.
Yes, because it's none of the government's goddamn business what we put in our own bodies.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
It amazes me that so many people who advocate control of drugs think that the way to achieve this is by criminalizing them.. Since the government , or related industry , is not allowed to sell or manage illegal substances they basically have handed over control to the underground. And.. considering the profits to be made in the current illegal drug trade.. it is certainly NOT in the best interests of the underground trade to have *anything* legalized..it's been implied in the past that some of the stiffest political support for keeping the status quo has been *supported* by the 'underground'.. and I'd believe that one... as regards Meth.. for better or worse.. when it was still legal and in the hands of physicians.. it's been implied that it *won* world war 2 (!)