Government of China Seize Approximately 7,000 Crypto Mining Machines
The government of China has recently confiscated and seized approximately 7,000 crypto mining machines. This happened due to such mining machines consuming electric power illegitimately.
China began checking more than 70,000 households, 3,061 merchants, 1,470 communities, in addition to factories, mines, courtyards and villages in the Tangshan city of the Kaiping District. The result of such monitoring is the cryptocurrency mining confiscation. Tangshan police, in cooperation with the Chinese State Electric Power Department and other organizations of power in China conducted checks and surveys as they got messages about suspicious electricity use.
From the start of the search last April, and until today China has confiscated 6,890 ASIC miners and 52 high-power transformers. Chinese Police reported that crypto miners were stealing electricity from surrounding villages. They also added that Bitcoin (BTC) mining machines were working nonstop (24 hours a day) and consuming electricity 40 times higher than a regular Chinese family could consume.
Drastic measures on China crypto mining
Nowadays, BTC and crypto miners of China are liable for as much as 66% of the global hash rate. So authorities of China have been actively struggling with controlling unlawful use of energy by crypto miners. For example, controllers in China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region increased monitoring on crypto mining companies in mid-November. They aim to forward control units to secure the “clean-up and correction of crypto token mining companies” in the region.
Another example we can observe is Abkhazia. Their government has reinforced efforts on the identification of crypto mining farms in the country. The authorities noticed a strange coincidence earlier in December between the significantly increased loads on electric networks and number of illegal crypto mining farms, which connected to a local power utility.
Iranian politicians in November offered an award to anyone who provides information about unlawful mining operations within the country. Those helpers who reveal illegal cryptocurrency mining operations that are using subsidized electricity will supposedly receive up to 20% of the recovered damages.
