Despite the facilities to perform crypto mining in China, the authorities do not hesitate to stop those who engage in this activity by stealing electricity.
More than 200 Bitcoin and Ethereum mining machines were seized in a police operation in Anhui Province, in eastern China. According to reports from the local Xinhua agency, the high energy consumption in the place was what caught the attention in the first instance.
The person responsible for the equipment had stolen about 150,000 kW per hour of electric power for more than a month, in Hanshan County. The police discovered that the short circuit of a power line had been caused to evade the payment of the service. The thief claimed to have purchased the mining equipment during the month of April, but did not take into account that the cost of electric power to maintain his operational mining farm amounted to approximately $ 923 dollars per day.
A similar incident occurred recently in the Asian country, when in April of this year, the police confiscated 600 Bitcoin mining equipment. In this opportunity the alert also emerged from a high electrical consumption, not corresponding to the average reflected in the area, which resulted in the apprehension of 6 subjects for stealing electricity in the city of Tianjin, northwest China.
Cryptocurrency mining consumes high levels of electricity in order to carry out the heavy process of validation of transactions in the blockchain. China still has the largest amount of processing power of blockchain networks in its territory, shared between companies such as Antpool, BTC.com, ViaBTC and F2Pool, due to advantages such as the ease of access to efficient and low-cost electricity service, as well as to equipment that is manufactured in this country. However, some important companies such as Bitmain have already been migrating to other latitudes for regulatory reasons and operational profitability.
In the area of the sale of cryptocurrencies and the investment in blockchain assets, China has made regulations in recent years, such as the temporary closure of exchange houses and the dismantling of fraudulent or pyramidal investment schemes, which were identified and accounted for for specialized studies.
On the other hand, this same year, the distributed accounting technology was praised by the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, who was in favor of its development in one of his speeches.