To report it is CCTV on Sunday, but the news began to spread via social media only starting from yesterday; according to reports, the Chinese authorities have seized something like 7 thousand cryptocurrency mining machines; all this was the result of an action that led to the search of almost 100 thousand families, more than 3 thousand merchants, including factories, mines and entire villages in the Kaiping district (in Tangshan). The investigations had been ongoing for over a year and related to the theft of electricity in the area, not for nothing it could only have happened thanks to the collaboration with the state electricity department which monitored consumption in the district and found several anomalies. The devices seized are all ASICs (the manufacturer is not known), which were kept in operation every day twenty-four hours a day, generating consumption equal to forty times that of a normal family unit. The phenomenon of electricity theft related to cryptocurrency mining is becoming very common in countries such as China, Iran and, in principle, wherever the low cost of electricity has favored the spread of the skills needed to mine; the problem, however, even if in a different way, also exists in the West, where more typically rather than just stealing energy, corporate or public networks are exploited to undermine cryptocurrencies, thus stealing not only energy but also the same power of calculation.

In any case, this does not mean that there is a crackdown on miners in China, this type of activity is aimed at preventing electricity theft and the crackdown is directed at illegal mining farms, not at the numerous activities that undermine in compliance with the law in China. Given that the main cost of extracting bitcoins and pow coins more generally is that of electricity, the temptation to illegally subtract energy from the network is very strong, also because this means maximizing profits; obviously a phenomenon of this type has some possibility of going unnoticed only as long as it is not exaggerated, when instead the theft of electricity becomes systemic and in a geographically limited area you get to install something like 7 thousand ASIC there is no possibility that the authorities do not realize the theft. I guess it wouldn't have been nice for the more than 70,000 families involved in the searches to find the police outside the front door, however I don't think there was a different way to end illegal mining in the area; the authorities for the control of the electricity grid, in fact, can easily notice an anomalous consumption in a certain area but from here to identify the exact point on which we are attached to the grid we pass and not even a little. Considering that the average price of an ASIC is around $ 1,500, to conclude, we are talking about a police action that led to the confiscation of devices intended for the mining of cryptocurrencies for an amount equal to more than 10 million dollars, while not it is known whether, during the same action, wallets containing the coins obtained by means of illegal mining were also seized.