Bitcoin fever has apparently spread to the highest levels of Russian defense. Several scientists working at top-secret Russian nuclear warhead facility have been arrested for mining Bitcoin while on the job. The scientists are being accused of using one of the country's most powerful supercomputers to mine the cryptocurrency.

The scientists were working at the Russian Federal Nuclear Center in Sarov. Computers within nuclear facilities are rarely connected to the internet as a preventative measure against hacking. However, on February 8th the scientists apparently logged on in order to cash in on crypto.

"Indeed, there was an attempt to unauthorized use of office computing capacities for personal purposes, including for so-called mining," says head of the research institute's press service, Tatyana Zalesskaya, to Russian news service Interfax.



The computational force needed to mine Bitcoin has been rapidly increasing, according to the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index. But with a petaflop of power, the ability to do do one quadrillion floating point operations per second, the scientists perhaps hoped they would be able to make a dent in a suddenly crowded marketplace.

The FSB, successor agency to the USSR's KGB, had other plans, and the scientists are now the subjects of a criminal case.

Source: BBC

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