According to a report by Xin’an Evening , a Bitcoin mining farm was cracked down by local police force in Bengbu, Anhui Province. The local electric power company lost around 1,000 RMB a day for the past 6 months.

50 Bitcoin ASIC miners detained by local police in Anhui Province Photo credit:Xin’an Evening

Starting from 19th May, Power Company discovered that the line loss rate of a local community surged to 97% while normal number should be 5%. An inspection team was dispatched to check the household power meters one by one but nothing unusual detected. At the end of last month, inspectors found an extra white cable attached to the starter box in a building, which leads to a room on ground floor. Then they discovered that the front door of the apartment was blocked by brick and mortar and window by dark curtain but the sound of machine in operation cannot be fully suppressed. They broke into the house next day along with policeman and found 50 sets of Bitcoin ASIC miners busy digging.

Actually it’s nothing new to the Chinese community since stealing power might be the only way for an individual miner to make his business profitable. Similar news popped up from time to time. Just to name a few:

2015-12-29 Bitcoin miners theft case, 1.6 million involved

2016-03-27 Illegal Bitcoin mining farm with 200 Bitcoin miners cracked down

2016-06-02 3 Bitcoin mining site busted, 74 miners detained

As per blockmeta , the Bitcoin network difficulty will be 312,267,622,672, a 8.9% gain over the last 14 days . We are seeing new players in the arena like the new 14nm chips manufacturers or government-funded projects like and Weiyuanyungu’s Data center with hosting capability up to 150,000 units in Inner Mongolia, , aside from the well-known Xinjiang data center of Bitmain.

Cornerstone laying ceremony of Blockchain cloud computing data center in Inner Mongolia. Photo credit: northnews

The race for hashing rate is so fierce that even professional miners are under pressure. Jiang Zhuo’er, owner of lbtc1btc mining pool, claimed that he had sold all of his LTC miners in October.

“to make room for next generation chips”

Back to the illegal mining farm case, as per the calculation of power company, at 1000kw/h per unit, the 50 miners is burning 51 KW an hour, 1224 KW a day, which means the power company lost 960 RMB daily. If the mining farm had been online since 19th May, then the thief managed to make gross profit of 182,000 RMB, or 230,000 KW from the free power.

The mysterious disappearance of Friedcat, founder of ASICMINER, was said to be associated with a similar case.

Usually at the end of such news released by the authority, police would say:

We are still chasing the people behind this.

In fact, we never heard of anyone get caught for stealing power, which is considered state-owned property.