(Newswire.net — February 14, 2018) –Mining is one way to obtain crypto currency but in order to have decent results one would need a strong computer that can calculate a huge amount of data in a reasonable amount of time.
Home build computer farms can do the trick if you have enough patience and wait for years. It also requires a lot of energy so when the electricity bill arrives, it is questionable if the whole endeavor was worthwhile.
The process would be much more efficient, however, if you have access to a supercomputer with an unlimited power supply. But that could be a bad idea especially if you are in Russia.
Scientists from one of the best guarded nuclear centers in Russia have been arrested by the state police, BBC cited the Russian news agency.
The scientists have been accused of using computers designed for research to mine crypto-currencies.
The incident took place in the Federal Nuclear Center in Sarov, one of several that are completely closed off to the public, which serve exclusively for nuclear research, and they were created at the time of the Soviet Union alliance.
This site does not exist on any Russian map, and it is not expected that any such incidents occur in installations of such a covert profile, especially not activities related to crypto-mining.
It was announced that mining was stopped on time, and that the scientists conducting the mining have been handed over to the authorities to prosecute them. Some reports state that crypto-criminals allegedly used a super-computer center to mine Bitcoin, since mining requires a significant processing power, which such a device can certainly provide.
Using a supercomputer from one of the most heavily guarded cites in the world to turn a profit is a bold move, but the way the scientists though they could get away with it and have no one notice is surprisingly stupid for guys that are supposed to be among the smartest people on the planet.
The abused device was in offline mode in order to be protected from hacking attacks. When the scientists tried to connect it to the Internet to start mining the supercomputer alarmed the security team, who then called on the Russian Federal Service.
The forbidden city of Sarov is one of the top secret scientific cities of the Soviet era specially designed only for scientists and their families. Its nuclear research facility is surrounded by a tightly guarded no-man’s-land, with barbed wire fences to keep the curious away. The facility’s supercomputer has a capacity of 1 petaflop, the equivalent of 1,000 trillion calculations per second, Russian news agencies reported.