Police arrested Dutch man with Bitcoin mining farm for money laundering (opens in new tab)

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41 pointsjeroen9470412y ago14 comments

14 comments

13 comments · 4 top-level

adaml_62312y ago· 3 in thread

By definition if you obtain any monetary benefit from a criminal act then it is Money Laundering. It encompasses a lot of different possible activities. Tax evasion is a crime but if you take that money and transfer it to an overseas account then that is money laundering.

(posted this same comment in the other HN comment thread about this story)

IgorPartola12y ago

Hold on. Isn't BTC property, not money? By that logic this is like stealing corn, making candy corn, then selling it. Still illegal, but not money laundering.

bjitty12y ago

This didn't happen in the US. Although maybe the Dutch government has declared it property as well. I'm not sure.

the_mitsuhiko12y ago

Only as far as the IRS i considered.

pyalot212y ago· 3 in thread

Can we lay it off with the aprils fools already?

zackliscio12y ago

On a positive note, now I have a full year before online tech media wastes an entire day highlighting products that don't exist, and why they are so funny. They don't seem to have grasped that explaining a joke kills the humor...

coldtea12y ago

>now I have a full year before online tech media wastes an entire day highlighting products that don't exist

One full year? That's too optimistic. We'll soon be flooded with reviews and articles wasted on programs that don't exist: Apple product rumors, half-baked Google non-products, Microsoft prototypes...

celticninja12y ago

Explaining a joke is like disecting a frog, you understand it better but the frog is dead.

profquail12y ago· 2 in thread

I read an interesting paper not long ago that discussed exactly such a scenario (stealing electricity to mine Bitcoin). The paper is titled, "Bitcoin & Gresham's Law -- The Economic Inevitability of Collapse":

http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/bitcoin/Bitcoin%20and%20Gres...

etherael12y ago

This paper addresses the pre ASIC landscape. Stealing power from standard systems to mine bitcoin right now would be a complete waste of time, you would get almost nothing from the package with even a ridiculous amount of standard systems.

All heavy duty mining nowadays is done by ASICs, even high end dedicated GPU farms can't compete, letalone the kind of machines likely to fall victim to a botnet. If someone did try to hijack those ASICs, you can bet the people running the mining business would notice, assuming it were even possible.

It's interesting how this might apply to an altcoin that actually manages to crack the problem of CPU only mining that a few have tried, however. This particular niche will always have this as a potential problem going forward.

kanzure12y ago

> an altcoin that actually manages to crack the problem of CPU only mining