There was something going on in sector 7-G.
For non-Simpsons fans, a recent case involving illicit BTC mining at a Russian nuclear facility is turning heads.
Coindesk and other venues are reporting on the high profile case where a Russian nuclear scientist got caught mining Bitcoin from his work-space in a Russian nuclear lab.
According to the Moscow Times, a fellow named Denis Baykov was fined some 450,000 rubles by a city court for utilizing supercomputer infrastructure at the plant to generate Bitcoin. That fee translates to about $7,000.
The plant in Sarov, Russia was a former nuclear bomb manufacturing site and has some pretty substantial computing equipment, including machines that can perform a petaflop per second.
In public comments that seem strangely transparent, BBs lawyer noted that the dwell time for this particular Bitcoin scheme was rather lengthy, clarifying that the engineer was not caught on the first day of his mining adventure.
If Baykov was the Sarov lab’s Homer Simpson, Carl and Lenny were also involved; two other employees have also been identified as potential conspirators.
The case of the Russian nuclear scientist is one of many where budding entrepreneurs are utilizing public or corporate computing power to enrich themselves with Bitcoin. After all, the coin of the realm, in the Bitcoin world, is raw computing power fed by electricity. We’ve seen widespread reports, for example, of U.S. college students siphoning off energy from the University grid to mine.
These prominent cases show how cryptocurrency generates value in a very different way from fiat currencies. You can’t print your own money, but interestingly enough, you can build your own Bitcoin, and with these coins valued at $8000 apiece, there’s a substantial upside for clever cryptojackers to profit quite handily.