Some 600 bitcoin mining computers have been stolen in Iceland, in what is being described as one of the biggest thefts ever in the small island nation.

A total of 11 people have been arrested so far after four burglaries in the Reykjanes peninsula.

The computers have still not been found it is rumored that the worth of these stolen computers is almost £1.5m.

Icelandic media have dubbed the crime the “big bitcoin heist” and the thieves could potentially make more money if they use the computers to mine the cryptocurrency and then sell it.

“This is a grand theft on a scale unseen before,” police commissioner Olafur Helgi Kjartansson said, NBC reported. “Everything points to this being a highly organized crime.”

Bitcoin gained a lot of publicity when its value increased by an astonishing $20,000 from $1000 which is an impressive 20x growth

It is a digital currency that was created in 2009 by a mysterious figure using the alias Satoshi Nakamoto and can be used to buy or sell items.

Bitcoins is not exactly a liquid form of money as it does not exist in physical form, there is no central bank not does a record of each transaction exist. It uses anonymized strings of numbers to identify a transaction. Which is then stored in a huge public ledger known as a blockchain.

Mining is the process which is the way the supply of bitcoin can be increased.

A computer owned by a bitcoin miner must solve a mathematical problem, for the transaction of even a single Bitcoin. As this process is complete the miner accordingly receives a fraction of a bitcoin as a benefit.