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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' !!
2,000,000 / 600 = 3,333.33...
According to Tom's Hardware, a Geforce GTX 1080 runs between 600 to 1400 dollars. Each. Let's assume two in each machine at an average of 1000 dollars to get some quality gear without going overboard, that's 2000 dollars out of those 3000. Add in mobo, CPU, RAM, a hard drive etc. to have a working computer, which I assume these Bitcoin rigs are, and you quickly approach the 3000 target.
But hey, math and logic doesn't lead to "OMG corruption!" comments, so you just keep doing you.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
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...
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.
Here comes another issues which may cause bitcoin value and price to fall
Why go for the GTX 1080? A Quadro P5000 is pushing that sort of price when new. Bitcoin miners do go overboard. They make a lot of money from this, so they invest in the best hardware.
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.
Because I'm not part of the Bitcoin craze and honestly have no idea what mining them requires other than "awesome graphics cards".
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
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.
So you have no idea what mining them requires, period, because mining Bitcoin doesn't use any graphics cards anymore.
Ezekiel 23:20
You can use a hydro plant in Iceland to generate electricity for your data center and use downstream water to cool said data center at the same time. And you don't even heat up the river significantly because of conservation of energy. It's a win-win!
Ezekiel 23:20
Which is to your credit, although as it happens, "awesome graphics cards" are no longer a good choice for bitcoin.
Dedicated hardware is used by major bitcoin farms. The high grade graphics cards are used for other scams. I mean, other cryptocurrencies.
Even there though, your basic economics kicks in. Miners want to optimise purchase price, power costs and output, so super awesome cards don't give the price/performance that stepping down to slightly less awesome cards offer.
Or a weed plantation. Or a datacenter. Or a trader in derivatives. Or maybe they stole some stirling engines as well and are generating their own electricity from volcanic heat.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
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.
That's for seizures, in those cases the police like to inflate the value of the drugs in order to show what a great job they've done. This was the theft from a private individuals (or organisations). It's not so much in the police's interest to inflate the value of goods that were stolen, and that they've so far been able to recover.
They don't need SLI (why would you decapitalize "interleaving"?) but they do need a motherboard with adequate PCIEx16 slots if they don't want to be hacking card edges down. Or whatever they call slots with less lanes than pins, I'm sure those would be fine.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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
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.
Or a weed plantation. Or a datacenter. Or a trader in derivatives. Or maybe they stole some stirling engines as well and are generating their own electricity from volcanic heat.
The difference is that unlike these other data applications, mining servers do not have to be connected to the Internet. Energy usage is the only way to detect them.
They're also in Iceland for the same reason aluminum smelting is. The geothermally generated electrical power there is very inexpensive. Residential consumption is only 4% of the power generated in Iceland.
> mining servers do not have to be connected to the Internet.
I mean they have to be connected to the internet, if they plan to make any money from them anyway. I suppose only one coordinating server needs to have a constant connection, the rest could be behind a firewall of some sort, syncing the block-chain and results over 3G or something back to the coordinating server. But I believe bitcoin has about the longest block-chain difficulty, with difficulty to solve at an average of one block worldwide every 10 minutes and first results reported with a distinct advantage, so you would be hurting your profits a lot, if it takes more than 30 seconds for round trip communication to the internet, so any sort of physical barrier from the internet would need to be very small.
Clearly, you've never worked in law enforcement. There are other purposes in inflating the prices of goods. Pushing the crime into a different category that allows harsher sentencing, getting more departmental resources, sheltering your team from extra cases, and what not.
Back in the 80s, I spent some time as an army 'loan' to civilian law enforcement. I used to feel so superior to them, watching their office politics, and staying above them (mostly, because I had no dog in the fight). What did I know, I had just gotten my first star. Once the army finally decided that they actually had something to use me on, and pulled me back, I realized that the politics and infighting were just as bad, but the players were older, and had less understanding of investigative work.
As soon as quitting no longer meant that I was going to be a janitor for life, I chose a brand new career, in IT. Maybe I've been lucky, but the politics have been a lot less ugly. Or maybe it was going from Commie government organizations to a privately owned American manufacturer.
No good deed goes unpunished...
Will they also be looking out for people installing solar panels?
J