

Police arrested Dutch man with Bitcoin mining farm for money laundering - jeroen94704
http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Ftweakers.net%2Fnieuws%2F95169%2Fpolitie-pakt-nederlander-met-bitcoinmining-farm-wegens-witwassen.html

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adaml_623
By definition if you obtain any monetary benefit from a criminal act then it
is Money Laundering. It encompasses a lot of different possible activities.
Tax evasion is a crime but if you take that money and transfer it to an
overseas account then that is money laundering.

(posted this same comment in the other HN comment thread about this story)

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IgorPartola
Hold on. Isn't BTC property, not money? By that logic this is like stealing
corn, making candy corn, then selling it. Still illegal, but not money
laundering.

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bjitty
This didn't happen in the US. Although maybe the Dutch government has declared
it property as well. I'm not sure.

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profquail
I read an interesting paper not long ago that discussed _exactly_ such a
scenario (stealing electricity to mine Bitcoin). The paper is titled, "Bitcoin
& Gresham's Law -- The Economic Inevitability of Collapse":

[http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/bitcoin/Bitcoin%20and%20Gres...](http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/bitcoin/Bitcoin%20and%20Gresham%27s%20law%20-%20the%20economic%20inevitability%20of%20collapse%20-%20Ian%20Grigg.pdf)

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etherael
This paper addresses the pre ASIC landscape. Stealing power from standard
systems to mine bitcoin right now would be a complete waste of time, you would
get almost nothing from the package with even a ridiculous amount of standard
systems.

All heavy duty mining nowadays is done by ASICs, even high end dedicated GPU
farms can't compete, letalone the kind of machines likely to fall victim to a
botnet. If someone did try to hijack those ASICs, you can bet the people
running the mining business would notice, assuming it were even possible.

It's interesting how this might apply to an altcoin that actually manages to
crack the problem of CPU only mining that a few have tried, however. This
particular niche will always have this as a potential problem going forward.

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kanzure
> an altcoin that actually manages to crack the problem of CPU only mining

You may be interested in:

[http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/bitcoin/asic-
faq.pdf](http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/bitcoin/asic-faq.pdf)

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wmf
I'm not sure I agree with this FAQ. Related discussion from the other day:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7512222](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7512222)

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tinbad
Actually the original title of the article (I speak Dutch) was: Illegal
bitcoin producer gets caught (literal translation), then in the first
paragraph the article goes on how the guy was 'making' fake bitcoins.

It's also good to know that the newspaper in question is the 'Fox news' of the
Netherlands. It's known for sensational, on the edge of fictional journalism.
On top of everything they're obviously uneducated on many of the stories they
publish.

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computer
For what it's worth, I think when this comment was made the submission linked
to a different article-- Tweakers.net, the current source, is the most
respected Dutch language tech news source.

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pyalot2
Can we lay it off with the aprils fools already?

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zackliscio
On a positive note, now I have a full year before online tech media wastes an
entire day highlighting products that don't exist, and why they are so funny.
They don't seem to have grasped that explaining a joke kills the humor...

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coldtea
> _now I have a full year before online tech media wastes an entire day
> highlighting products that don 't exist_

One full year? That's too optimistic. We'll soon be flooded with reviews and
articles wasted on programs that don't exist: Apple product rumors, half-baked
Google non-products, Microsoft prototypes...

