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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.'"
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.
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?
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"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.
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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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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