If the government sees something as a public Bad[1], they're not going to put it back into the economy.
If the government seizes drugs, they don't just redistribute it because it "makes money."
[1]: Regardless of whether you agree with the government here. I also don't know if bitcoin mining is illegal or if it was just the stealing of electricity that was a problem.
Malaysia has some of the cheapest retail power on Earth.
This is the usual performative nonsense by a foolish government. They could have easily sold them at auction like they do with all sorts of other seized goods. ASIC's go for a few thousand dollars each.
Perhaps it's among the cheapest because it's subsidized as a public good?
EDIT: According to Wikipedia, it's heavily tiered and heavily subsidized, but also that it shouldn't be particularly helpful for mining, unless they're splitting it into a bunch of accounts to stay in one of the lower tiers:
Domestic consumer pricing per kWh used, subsidized
4.95 @ 1 to 200 kWh
7.59 @ 201 to 300 kWh
11.73 @ 301 to 600 kWh
12.41 @ 601 to 900 kWh
12.98 @ 901 kWh onwards
(exchange rate of 4.4 MYR to US$1 on 24 November 2016)
I live in Malaysia. Electricity is not very cheap once you go above 300 kWh. The current tiers (at least on my most recent monthly bill) are as follows:
- RM 0.218 (USD 0.052) per kWh for the first 200kWh
- RM 0.334 (USD 0.079) per kWh for the next 100kWh
- RM 0.516 (USD 0.120) per kWh for the 300kWh after
Those prices are before the 1.6% tax by the government. And furthermore, any usage above 600kWh is taxed an additional 6% by the energy company.
Live in Malaysia too and am always astounded how much power people use here, they seem very wasteful with aircon.
Generally average about 250kwh per month for 2 people in a 1200 sqf apartment with occasional aircon use. Paying ~6c/kwh is much better than nearly everywhere else on Earth. As a westerner in the country it's basically a rounding error compared to other life costs.
With government bonuses that get thrown around the cost really isn't much unless you are incredibly wasteful or have a huge family/house. Most of the country has gotten big power handouts for covid. I paid 30 RM ($7.50 USD) a few months ago. A pint down the pub costs nearly that.
That's simply not true. Electricity prices vary by a considerable factor, even among the cheapest sources. The Bitcoin price is identical, globally. These two can only coexist if there is a considerable margin to be made in mining, allowing for it to be profitable in a relatively wide span of electricity prices (of course still excluding the highest-priced sources, it is not that wide!).
As far as my information goes, there were times when mining a >30k$ coin was possible for less than 4k$ in electricity, if you had access to really cheap sources. That's far from "don't really make much money".
There might not exist a single global market, but whenever the Bitcoin price is different in these markets, there's an arbitrage opportunity. As a silly example, if the Bitcoin price was 4.000 USD in one market and 40.000 USD in another market, you could buy one Bitcoin in the first one, sell it in the second one, and pocket the 36.000 USD difference. Buying Bitcoin in a market increases the price there (suppose there were 10 Bitcoin for 4.000 USD each and 12 Bitcoin for 4.200 USD each, after the first 10 Bitcoin are bought the price is now 4.200 USD), and selling Bitcoin in a market decreases the price there (it's the same dynamic in the opposite direction). After some time, the prices will converge.
That is: as long as arbitrage between the markets is viable (for instance, it must be possible to move Bitcoin and fiat between the markets at a low enough cost), even though there's no single global market, the prices will tend to be close enough.
Bitcoin price is identical globally. The price of bitcoin in USD/GBP/EUR is pretty much the same with respect to the values of each currency. There may be outliers, eg. Venezuela, but that's because it might be priced in the local currency, which is itself inflating at a rapid pace, so it loses value against bitcoin and the dollar or euro
Can "Bitcoin price" be defined as something other than what it's selling for on various exchanges? Right now BTC is going for $31,599 on Bitpanda, $31,384 on eToro, and $30,327 on Coinmama.
Also, because these rigs were apparently using stolen electricity, chances are that the only reason it was profitable for the owners to operate was that they weren't paying market rates for electricity. So there's no way to legalize the operation and make it profitable (either because local electricity costs are higher than world average, or because these particular miners were inefficient, or whatever).
