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Thieves Steal 600 Powerful Bitcoin-Mining Computers In Iceland (apnews.com)
The Associated Press reports of a Bitcoin heist in Iceland where thieves stole some 600 computers used to "mine" bitcoin and other virtual currencies. "Some 11 people were arrested, including a security guard, in what Icelandic media have dubbed the 'Big Bitcoin Heist,'" reports the Associated Press. From the report: The powerful computers, which have not yet been found, are worth almost $2 million. But if the stolen equipment is used for its original purpose -- to create new bitcoins -- the thieves could turn a massive profit in an untraceable currency without ever selling the items. Three of four burglaries took place in December and a fourth took place in January, but authorities did not make the news public earlier in hopes of tracking down the thieves. Police tracking the stolen computers are monitoring electric consumption across the country in hopes the thieves will show their hand, according to an industry source who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not allowed to speak to the media. Unusually high energy usage might reveal the whereabouts of the illegal bitcoin mine. Authorities this week called on local internet providers, electricians and storage space units to report any unusual requests for power.
At USD 2M, I am guessing they are rather large? Or, maybe not.
Take off every 'sig' !!
"Unusually high energy usage might reveal the whereabouts of the illegal bitcoin mine."
Pfft.
Who knew there were 600 computers in Iceland?
I have a feeling there is some "DEA accounting" going on here. You know the kind: "A pound of marijuana with a street value of over $5 billion dollars was seized today...".
It's probably more like 30 computers, worth $90,000, and they're probably just stripping out the video cards to sell to gamers on Ebay.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The perps stole 600 GPUs. It was only 100 computers that were stolen, apparently each one with 6 GPUs on there. Translated quote: "There were 600 graphics cards, 100 power sources, 100 motherboards, 100 memory discs and 100 CPUs" -- http://www.visir.is/g/20181802...
Just fly over a city and look for houses with no snow on the roof. Those will have dope plantations, meth cookers or bitcoin miners.
Police tracking the stolen computers are monitoring electric consumption across the country in hopes the thieves will show their hand
The computers are probably in China already, using cheap subsidized electricity, in a corner of a factory that runs ghost shifts. Good luck monitoring electricity usage to find that.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Blast away, you bloody crypto miners...
Give us gamers our gaming cards back, you bastards!!!!
Here comes another issues which may cause bitcoin value and price to fall
Paulie could do anything. Especially run up bills on the joint's credit. And why not? Nobody's gonna pay for it anyway. And as soon as the deliveries are made in the front door, you move the stuff out the back and sell it at a discount. You take a two hundred dollar case of booze and you sell it for a hundred. It doesn't matter. It's all profit. And then finally, when there's nothing left, when you can't borrow another buck from the bank or buy another case of booze, you bust the joint out. You light a match.
Stolen ASICs produce a merkle root with the illegal flag set so they won't be candidates for a generation block in the blockchain because it's impossible for them to generate a valid nounce. No one want illegal bitcoins, that would be like counterfeit money.
This explanation shows how ridiculous the concept of 'illegal bitcoins' are.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
From that article, it looks like in addition to the 600 server theft (valued at 200 million), the aforementioned 600 GPUs, etc. (valued at 20 million) have been stolen.
I was hoping to see an ELI5 about crime in Iceland. With only about 335K people and what I'd guess is a decent Scandinavian-style social welfare system and an extremely low GINI coefficient, not mention being an island in the North Atlantic, I would kind of expect crime in Iceland to be very minor, relegated to interpersonal disputes or impulsive, drunken-type behavior.
Heists? It seems like it would be difficult to create a criminal conspiracy and carry it out when you stand a good chance of running into someone you might know, if not a relative of some kind, everywhere. And where are you gonna take something you stole? Your choices are kind of limited if they don't involve a boat or the middle of a glacier.
Or is there some weird Norse raider social pathology that nobody talks about going on in Iceland?
At first I thought it was a text to speech transcript of a cat coughing up a furball.
#BringBackOurGPUs
There does not seem to be any mention of where they were stolen from. Genesis Mining is selling "cloud mining" services in Iceland, so my guess is from them. There are a few articles about them from 2014-2015 at least, mentioning cheap power and available cooling.. Their website lists several coins available to rent mining rigs for.
So could be Bitcoin ASICs that were stolen, or could be some form of GPU mining rigs. Those GPU rigs typically host 8-12 GPU's on a single motherboard. And Bitcoin is only custom ASIC these days...
Not self-descriptive.
How about #GPUsForGamers?
#DeleteFacebook
Don't click on his homepage link! creimer is trying to get you to subscribe automatically to his youtube channel, force you to watch his digi-feces videos and make money off you!
CREIMER' SUBMISSIONS UPDATE: /. so make sure to go to:
Note also that creimer is trying to regain karma by getting his submissions published as articles on
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and mod down his submissions as well. The great thing is that you don't even need mod points to mod down a submission, just click on the "minus" icon!
Yes, believe it or not, creimer owns all the above sock puppet accounts. It is a mystery why Slashdot management tolerates it!
creimer wrote:
I don't bother with mod points. I'm doing something much more sinister. It took ten story submissions ? I'll have to double check the number ? to move cdreimer's karma from neutral to excellent without ever being exposed to the capricious mods. Mmmmmwwwwahahahahahahaha!
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Danger, Will Robinson, Danger! Creimy is posting more than 2 posts a day. Hurry! mod down otherwise /. will go to hell again!
Note: you can mod down even if already at -1 to lower karma and to prevent lost /. users to accidentally mod up.
creimer wrote:
All you need to do is find a website with a permissive TOS, say, Slashdot, create a Python script to scrape your own comments, sprinkle Amazon affiliate links in various posts, and then re-post past links whenever possible. Won't be long before you start making "coffee money" each month.
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C.D. Reimer is a renowned Slashdot collaborator, as he puts it himself; "Because of the quality of my posts and my article submissions, I'm a highly rated commentator and moderator."
But does anybody ever wondered what "C.D." stands for? Well, it stands for Creimy Dumpty of course!
Creimy Dumpty sat on the wall,
Creimy Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses
And all the king's men
Couldn't put Creimy Dumpty
Together again.
Creimy's siblings video and theme song, very realistic, especially the pants, just like Creimy's:
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With "Vice President Pence Vowing US Astronauts Will Return To the Moon", we are sure they will need miracle workers up there, here is what it would look like. Note that Creimy takes care of bringing a lot of food to the moon as depicted below:
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Before the sex change:
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After the sex change:
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Unusually high energy usage might reveal the whereabouts of the illegal bitcoin mine.
Or a legal one. Or any of another thousands of possible businesses that require high electric consumption.
I imagine most thieves would want a quick buck not to be running 600 machines in one place for a long period of time ----
if they were collaborating and run the miners for themselves, I would suspect run they 60 10x-machine mining operations would be their strategy rather than 1 600-machine operation.
If those that lost the miners are smart, they'll have been keeping records of equipment serial numbers and report them as stolen back to the manufacturer that probably has some backdoor-means of identifying their miners on the network or "remote beacon" method of locating their IP, for instance.
Authorities this week called on local internet providers, electricians and storage space units to report any unusual requests for power
Internet providers? Have nil to do with electric delivery.
Quoth TFA:
Bitcoin is not "untraceable", else many companies like IBM, Oracle, and a slew of startups would not be selling blockchain analytics tools. There are unraceable cryprocurrencies, like Monero and ZCash. But Bitcoin? No.
Part of the Second American Revolution!
Well, it sounds like an ad, but I can't tell for what.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Mining is the only term for the activity. No need for "quotes" around it.
Earlier someone said S9. This is a purpuse built SHA256 ASIC computer that does nothing but mine that algorithm manufactured by Bitmain. Bitmains revenue exceeded Nvidia revenue last year.
Will they also be looking out for people installing solar panels?
J