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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.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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
"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.
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!"
To be fair, the people in Ohio are suspected first, and THEN their electricity records are being pulled to confirm suspicions.
Whereas in Canada, it looks like any random citizen's electricity usage can be monitored by the government.
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
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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:
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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.
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
All drugs should be legal.
I know somebody that has a rig that does 1700 million hashes per second and uses 1000 watts (using 4 ATI 6970's). If you plug it into here, you'll find he nets an average of $1450.89 per month considering electricity at $0.15 per kwh
http://bitcoinx.com/profit/index.php
I decided against doing it myself because the miner growth rate is so high right now. It's around 5% a day, which means if it continues at the same rate, in 3 months it'll be more like $170 per month for his rig.
Here are some charts showing the growth rate: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/