Bulldozing makes it harder to recycle. This also decreases supply of miners (though perhaps not materially) making it more expensive to mine, raising the price of Bitcoin, creating more incentive for electricity theft.
>They didn't do anything useful before being crushed.
That's your assessment, which doesn't really matter as long as there's still demand for mining ASICs. If that's the case it really is a waste because destroying them will just cause the demand to be satisfied via newly produced ASICs instead
Will it? ASICs seem to be totally legal there (and most other places in the world). The part that was illegal was stealing electricity. "Hoping" that "frequent images of mining ASICs being steamrolled will reduce demand" is wishful thinking at best.
Gamers could legitimately cry if they were video cards getting crushed but these are ASICs, all they can do is mine crypto, they're worthless for anything else so why not crush them?
The seized property is destroyed to show they're serious about punishing this kind of crimes (stealing $2M worth of electricity via bitcoin mining).
If you want to mine bitcoins, pay the bills or build your own power plant.
Can't say i'm happy about perfectly functional hardware just being destroyed.
There is a game theory argument that the police cannot be allowed to sell these, or it would incentivize them suddenly find lots of "illegal pc's" as a means of increasing their budget. But surely there must be a better solution than steamrolling them?
While I’m not sure how old these ones, older bitcoin ASICS are indeed only profitable on stolen power. If it produces 1c worth of magical internet money per kWh, then it has only illegal uses.
If you have solar power, you sometimes generate more electricity than you use. You can sell that power to the local power distributor, or store it in a battery. Both have efficiency loss issues (you may only get wholesale from the power company, and batteries wear out). Or you can use that excess power to generate cryptocurrency, and use that to buy more power from the utility provider when you need.
They're ASICs, they're worthless for anything except mining certain kinds of crypto, given current prices not only would reselling them be questionable from a pragmatic perspective but it would be essentially encouraging the kind of illegal activity (i.e. electricity theft) which caused them to be confiscated in the first place.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 81.6 ms ] threadThese were ASIC computers which were stealing electricity, all they can do is mine crypto, so what else are they good for except getting squashed?
Get back to me when that happens
Only in the short term. Difficulty adjustment makes the total mining power irrelevant over the long run.
That's your assessment, which doesn't really matter as long as there's still demand for mining ASICs. If that's the case it really is a waste because destroying them will just cause the demand to be satisfied via newly produced ASICs instead
I don't get it, did the "Bitcoin PCs" commit any crimes? Can an inanimate object even be responsible for crimes?
The seized property is destroyed to show they're serious about punishing this kind of crimes (stealing $2M worth of electricity via bitcoin mining). If you want to mine bitcoins, pay the bills or build your own power plant.
There is a game theory argument that the police cannot be allowed to sell these, or it would incentivize them suddenly find lots of "illegal pc's" as a means of increasing their budget. But surely there must be a better solution than steamrolling them?
Where are you getting this from? Are you saying the majority of bitcoin mining operations around the world operates on stolen electricity?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BM_SE5O28pM