A man in China has been sentenced to three and a half years in prison after stealing electricity from a train network in order to mine bitcoin.

Xu Xinghua from Shanxi province pleaded guilty to stealing 104,000 yuan (£11,300), which was used to mine 3.2 bitcoins.

At the current price of bitcoin, Mr Xinghua's bounty would be worth around £15,000, however at bitcoin's peak, it would have been worth close to £48,000.

Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Show all 8 1 /8 Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Satoshi Nakamoto creates the first bitcoin block in 2009 On 3 January, 2009, the genesis block of bitcoin appeared. It came less than a year after the pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto detailed the cryptocurrency in a paper titled 'Bitcoin: A peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System' Reuters Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Bitcoin is used as a currency for the first time On 22 May, 2010, the first ever real-world bitcoin transaction took place. Lazlo Hanyecz bought two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins – the equivalent of $90 million at today's prices Lazlo Hanyecz Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Silk Road opens for business Bitcoin soon gained notoriety for its use on the dark web. The Silk Road marketplace, established in 2011, was the first of hundreds of sites to offer illegal drugs and services in exchange for bitcoin Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures The first bitcoin ATM appears On 29 October, 2013, the first ever bitcoin ATM was installed in a coffee shop in Vancouver, Canada. The machine allowed people to exchange bitcoins for cash REUTERS/Dimitris Michalakis Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures The fall of MtGox The world's biggest bitcoin exchange, MtGox, filed for bankruptcy in February 2014 after losing almost 750,000 of its customers bitcoins. At the time, this was around 7 per cent of all bitcoins and the market inevitably crashed Getty Images Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Would the real Satoshi Nakamoto please stand up In 2015, Australian police raided the home of Craig Wright after the entrepreneur claimed he was Satoshi Nakamoto. He later rescinded the claim Getty Images Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Bitcoin's big split On 1 August, 2017, an unresolvable dispute within the bitcoin community saw the network split. The fork of bitcoin's underlying blockchain technology spawned a new cryptocurrency: Bitcoin cash REUTERS Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Bitcoin's price sky rockets Towards the end of 2017, the price of bitcoin surged to almost $20,000. This represented a 1,300 per cent increase from its price at the start of the year Reuters

Bitcoin mining – the process of generating new units of the cryptocurrency by confirming transactions on an online ledger called the blockchain – has become extremely popular in China in recent years, thanks to relatively cheap electricity prices in the country.

As the bitcoin network grows, the processing power needed to mine them also grows. This has led to a government-led crackdown in China on illegal bitcoin mining operations.

"Local utility agencies and companies will be held accountable if they failed to shut down illegal bitcoin mining operation," a government notice issued by the Economic and Information Commission (EIC) stated in July.