Russian Nuclear Scientist Arrested For 'Bitcoin Mining Plot' Using Supercomputer
Russia authorities have arrested a number of scientists at one of the country's top-secret nuclear warhead facilities after they allegedly tried to mine Bitcoin using its supercomputer. The facility's security was alerted after the computer attempted to connect to the internet, something it was not intended to do so.
"There has been an unsanctioned attempt to use computer facilities for private purposes including so-called mining," a spokesperson for the Federal Nuclear Center in Sarov, Western Russia told Interfax News Agency. "Their activities were stopped in time. As far as we are aware, a criminal case has been launched against them."
The Federal Nuclear Center is overseen by Rosatom, the Russian nuclear agency. During the Cold War, USSR's first nuclear bomb was produced at Sarov, during Joseph Stalin's rule. The top-secret town is not marked on Soviet maps and special permits are still required for Russians to visit it.
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In 2011, the center launched its new supercomputer with a capacity of 1 petaflop, allowing it to undertake one thousand trillion operations per second. However, the computer was not intended to be connected to the internet preventing it from mining the cryptocurrency. Following the attempted mining operation, the employees were handed over to the Russian Federal Security Service.
Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin do not rely on centralized computer servers but rather individuals who give computer processing power to the crypto-currency system. These people are then rewarded for their processing power with Bitcoin.
However, mining requires great computational power and huge amounts of energy. There have been reports of Russian industrial facilities being used to mine Bitcoin with one Russia businessman reportedly buying two power plants to fuel his operations.
As of writing, Bitcoin is trading at $8,400, having reached a peak of over $19,000 late last year. While Bitcoin mining has been one of the most profitable cryptocurrency ventures, the decreasing amount of rewards has made it a very expensive operation over the past few years.
