News China’s Setting up a Hotline for Snitching on Cryptocurrency Miners

InvalidError

Titan
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There is a simple way of tracking down significant scale crypto-miners: investigate power bill history. If houses in the neighborhood average 400kWh/month even with two EVs and one house in the lot is pushing 4MWh/month, there is a very high probability the resident is mining or doing something highly unusual that warrants investigation.
 
China Government: We accuse you of mining 0.00001337 bitcoin.

Accused: I swear I was only running a Microsoft Help Hotline. Here are all of the transcripts of the last 30 days.

China Government: Carry on.
 

Exploding PSU

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Jul 17, 2018
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There is a simple way of tracking down significant scale crypto-miners: investigate power bill history. If houses in the neighborhood average 400kWh/month even with two EVs and one house in the lot is pushing 4MWh/month, there is a very high probability the resident is mining or doing something highly unusual that warrants investigation.

Either that, or someone in the neighborhood has just upgraded to a Vega 56 with that power spike
 

Truckinupga

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The final nails are being put into crypto's coffin, all across the board stock's are getting even more volatile. I've also seen some minor price drop's in the few available graphic cards. Start keeping an eye on ebay and places like it for an increase in used cards, some of the smart ones will be reading the tea leaves while they can still get a decent return on their cards.
 
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wr3zzz

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Inner Mongolia got flagged by China's central government as a excessive carbon emitter. The province attracts lots of miners because it has rich coal deposits to feed its many power plants but crypto consume massive amount of electricity without adding anything back to the real economy.
 
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castl3bravo

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Inner Mongolia got flagged by China's central government as a excessive carbon emitter. The province attracts lots of miners because it has rich coal deposits to feed its many power plants but crypto consume massive amount of electricity without adding anything back to the real economy.

That's simple math. It's too bad so many refuse to see the dark side of crypto.
 

watzupken

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There is a simple way of tracking down significant scale crypto-miners: investigate power bill history. If houses in the neighborhood average 400kWh/month even with two EVs and one house in the lot is pushing 4MWh/month, there is a very high probability the resident is mining or doing something highly unusual that warrants investigation.
I agree. They should be able to check individual household/ business' power usage against an average. You can't really conceal mining activities especially when you have a few graphic cards running 24/7. Power usage will stick out like a sore thumb.
 

InvalidError

Titan
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Sure, if by "secret" you mean "completely public and easily audited."
While the public ledger may allow anybody to see what wallets crypto has transited through since the block was originally solved, it doesn't put verified names and transaction descriptions on them. Auditing faceless, nameless go-between is somewhere between difficult and impossible. The only known points are when people cash in or out through someone who keeps trusted records.
 

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While the public ledger may allow anybody to see what wallets crypto has transited through since the block was originally solved, it doesn't put verified names and transaction descriptions on them. Auditing faceless, nameless go-between is somewhere between difficult and impossible. The only known points are when people cash in or out through someone who keeps trusted records.
...which is basically every exchange that converts BTC to USD or vice versa. I didn't say it was trivial, but if there's genuine suspicion of illegal activity it's not that hard to trace. I believe the original recommendation was to use a unique address for every transaction, but very few people actually do that. Difficulty arises with something like Monero that actually has privacy features. I wouldn't be surprised if "privacy coins" become illegal on USD or national currency-based exchanges.