According to local media, Chinese authorities have seized 6,890 bitcoin miners in the Kaiping district of Tangshan near Beijing.
70,000 households examined
Trustnodes writes that China Central Television (CCTV) says that the Tangshan police, in collaboration with the State Electric Power Department and other departments, have conducted extensive inspections. More than 70,000 households would have been inspected. Particular attention has been paid to excessive energy consumption, this way illegal mining can be traced.
This is comparable to how investigation services and network managers roll up weed farms in the Netherlands.
Major operation against current draining
But the police not only controlled Chinese citizens. It is really a major operation if we have to believe Trustnodes. The police also checked factories, mines, courtyards, 3,061 traders, 1,470 communities and villages.
During the investigation, the Chinese police discovered a suspicious transformer. This was found in a compound in a village in Shuangqiao Town, Kaiping District, Tangshan, Hebei. This transformer supplied power to no less than 1,906 bitcoin Asics on the same site. All these miners were active at the time of seizure.
This incident gave the police enough reason to conduct more investigations. Eventually, she discovered three more powerful transformers and 790 bitcoin miners. These miners were connected to the regular network and therefore used electricity from a nearby village.
Minen not forbidden
At the bottom of the line, the Chinese police have seized no fewer than 52 large transformers and 6,890 miners from the Asic brand. The police show that they crack down on electricity theft.
In this case, the police are not concerned with the fact that mining was taking place, but that electricity was being tapped illegally. The police were helped on their way by the local energy supplier, who noticed an unusually high consumption in that region.
Mining bitcoin is not illegal in China, although it would have been for a long time. The Chinese Communist Party is not in favor of decentralized cryptocurrencys such as bitcoin.
It is not clear what the government will do with all those confiscated miners. Normally these are auctioned or destroyed, but that is not always the case. On the other side of the world, all the way in Venezuela, the government used seized miners to mine bitcoins themselves.
We can see it reflected in the hashrate.
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