A Bitcoin miner from the Shanxi province in China is being jailed after to admitting to the theft of 104,000 yuan or approximately $15,000 worth of electricity from this train network.
Xu Xinghua tapped directly into the Datong train network's power grid to cut cost on his mining operation. He was apparently running at least 50 mining rigs and 3 electric fans for 24 hours a day between November and December 2017.
On April 2018, he had stolen over $15,000 worth of electricity and mined 3.2 Bitcoin. In April the price of this Bitcoin was worth about $19,000. However, taking into consideration the increase in Bitcoin mining difficulty despite the price continuing to decrease, it's hard to imagine that this was worth it to him. The mining difficulty has continued to increase in the last 6 months even with the price declining.
Mr. Xinghua will now spend the next 3.5 years behind bars for this and pay at least $14,500 dollars and take back all of his mining hardware.
Apparently his motivation to mine Bitcoin in the first place was the price increasing so quickly back in November and December and he was trying to take advantage of the cheap electricity prices in China at the time, and once the Chinese government ruled mining to be illegal, he must have felt that he had already made a large investment in his mining equipment.
Still, even after all this it doesn't seem like it was worth it? What do you think the price of Bitcoin will be by December 2018?