This Friday, we’re back to looking at cryptocurrency-related crime, this time in the Ukraine.
Anna Baydakova at Coindesk reports the Ukrainian SSU raided a mining facility in the town of Vinnitsa near Kiev.
Among confiscated items listed were 500 GPUs and 3800 Playstations.
Other stories about practical crypto mining indicate that the gaming console can be used for this purpose, although the amount of energy generated is not particularly high.
“The PS4 and PS4 Slim use a custom AMD Radeon 7970M GPU, with 18 compute units and 8 GB of GDDR5 memory with 176 GB/s of memory bandwidth,” writes Dr. Adrian Wong at Techarp. “It is roughly 20% slower than the AMD Radeon 7970M mobile GPU, but cryptomining is less about processing power, and memory bandwidth. So let’s just call PS4 Slim equivalent to the Radeon 7970M for mining purposes, which delivers a hash rate of about 8.35 H/s. Each PS4 console would be fast enough to generate 0.00013896 BTC worth US$7.62 per month. And that 16-console PS4 mining rig above would generate about 0.00222336 BTC worth US$121.92 per month.”
The picture included in Wong’s story, though, shows how these types of setups typically work – an ad hoc wireframe with dozens of Playstations jammed into it and connected to a pilfered electrical line can constitute major instances of what cybersecurity professionals call ‘coinjacking’ – the illicit use of device power to mine Bitcoin or some other digital asset.
All of this happens as the Ukraine unveils its “Draft Bill on Virtual Assets” law:
The Ukrainian parliament has released an updated version of the draft law ‘On Virtual Assets.’” writes an author at Kyiv Post. “The revised bill requires exchanges to obtain government authorization, disclose their ownership and implement mandatory KYC procedures. The document has been criticized by regulators in Kyiv but the government wants the legislation passed before the parliament’s summer break.”
Keeping an eye on how world governments treat cryptocurrencies – and crypto criminals – can help to inform your digital portfolio. How do you think these types of cat and mouse stories will play out?