A Russian engineer caught illegally mining Bitcoin(BTC)trade, using one of the country’s most powerful supercomputers at a Russian nuclear lab located near the city of Sarov. He has been fined 450,000 rubles, or $7,000, as reported by the Moscow Times.
Bitcoin mining is getting popular with the arrival of new mining hardware rigs with greater hash power including ASICs. However, it can cost the miner a lot higher if certain requirements are not fulfilled. So, miners in the past had been caught illegally stealing electricity, using bots that mines cryptocurrencies on hosts’ computers without letting them know, and leveraging numerous other illegal methods to mine Bitcoin. Now, a Russian nuclear scientist using the country’s most powerful supercomputer shows how far Bitcoin miners would go to accomplish the task.
As reported in the Moscow Times on Tuesday, Denis Baykov was fined by a penalty of 450,000 rubles ($7,000), imposed by the Sarov City Court for attempting to mine the world’s top cryptocurrency (by market valuation) illegally using one of the supercomputers available at the laboratory. According to the court’s documents, Denis Baykov was found guilty of illicitly leveraging the power of supercomputer available at the lab and violating a set of rules to access it.
The court further told the state-run RIA Novosti news agency that two other Sarov nuclear center employees — Andrei Rybkin and Andrei Shatokhin —had also been suspected for the same and are awaiting sentencing.
“Two criminal cases have been submitted to the Sarov City Court against employees of the nuclear center Rybkin and Shatokhin. No date has yet been set for the consideration of cases. In relation to another employee, Baykov, the case has already been examined, he was fined 450 thousand rubles. The sentence has not yet entered into legal force.”
Mining Bitcoin with a Supercomputer
Talking about the power of supercomputers presented at the lab, the Moscow Times also informs that the nuclear center’s supercomputer can reportedly reach the speed of 1,000 trillion transactions per second or one petaflop. Since the supercomputer in the center operates on its own separate network, the defendants used specifically developed software to avoid the restrictions and thus mined Bitcoin.
“I can say one thing for sure: they were not detained on the first day they began to mine,” Kovalyov told the Kremlin-funded RT television channel.
Last year, several scientists at the Sarov nuclear center were also arrested and detained while trying to “unauthorized use of official computing power” for cryptocurrency mining.
