One of three scientists caught illegally bitcoin mining at a Russian nuclear lab has been fined 450,000 rubles, or $7,000.
As reported in the Moscow Times Tuesday, Denis Baykov was handed the penalty by a jurisdictional city court for accessing the lab's supercomputer to illegally mine the world's top cryptocurrency by market valuation.
Located in Sarov, Russia, the top-secret lab was where the first Soviet nuclear bombs were manufactured in the late 1940s.
It remains home to some of Russia's most powerful computers.
The mining trio was first exposed last February and promptly handed over to the Federal Security Service.
Using the proof-of-work consensus mechanism, bitcoin harnesses miners to record transactions and secure the the blockchain with powerful energy-intensive computers.
According to today's report, Baykov, along with the two other lab employees, used specially designed software to mask mining on the lab's computer, which can conduct transactions up to 1,000 trillion operations per second, or one petaflop.
Hashes per second do not translate into operations per second, however.
"I can say one thing for sure: they were not detained on the first day they began to mine."
Court verdicts for the other two scientists have not yet been reached.
Russian Nuclear Scientist Gets $7,000 Fine for Mining Bitcoin at Work
gepubliceerd op Oct 1, 2019
by Coindesk | gepubliceerd op Coinage
Coinage
Vermeld in dit artikel
Recent nieuws
Alles zien
Blockchain Bites: Bitcoin's Run, Uniswap's Hemorrhaging Value, Anchorage's Banking Bid
Bitcoin is nearing all-time highs in price and market cap last set three years ago.
Japan's megabanks to lead experiment with digital yen
We have, in order, Cheese Bank with a $3.3 million theft, Akropolis with its $2 million loss, Value DeFi with a whopping $6 million exploit and finally Origin Protocol's loss of $7 million.
Number of new Bitcoin addresses spikes amid growing FOMO
Japan's three largest banks, as part of a group of 30 private sector actors, are set to collaborate on an experiment with a digital yen.
Not just Wall Street: Quant trader explains why Bitcoin price is going up
Sam Trabucco, a quantitative trader at Alameda Research, believes four general factors are pushing up the price of Bitcoin.