The Malaysian authorities have gone to extreme measures to prove that it is illegal to steal electricity to run crypto mining rigs: smash them with a steamroller. The circling video shows what looks like Antminers lying around and filling a parking lot at a police headquarters before the ruthless hands of justice lead a veritable honest steamroller on them all. The 47-second video doesn't show every device crashing, but according to PC Gamer, none of the 1.069 illicit mining rigs have been spared, which is certainly not pretty. The offending computers were seized in six raids conducted jointly by Malaysian police and Sarawak Energy Berhad (SEB) around an airport in the Sarawak region, where miners allegedly blew up SEB power lines to divert up to $2 million of electricity to power the platforms. .
Analysis: the staggering cost of crypto mining isn't just an expensive graphics card
In addition to the outrageous prices charged online for graphics cards like the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090, even at legitimate retailers, the crypto mining craze of the past few years has come at a much higher cost. Despite what cryptocurrency advocates claim, actual scientists who study the effects of crypto mining on the environment agree that it is an ecological disaster. Global cryptocurrency mining requires 110,000,000,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity each year, while all the solar panels in the United States produced only 90,000,000,000 kilowatt-hours in 2020. You can say that this waste of energy is well spent if you believe that cryptocurrencies have some utility beyond holding critical national infrastructure hostage for ransom, buying drugs online, or laundering money, but it's a siphon of energy. This may not be as straightforward as this case in Malaysia, where miners literally tapped into a power line and diverted electricity from legitimate use, but just one watt of electricity used to process blockchain transactions and generate bitcoins anywhere is one watt. less available for everything else. . . We keep powering our houses for a while to mine bitcoins. We power our world and mine bitcoins. That's not going to change, so no matter how hard advocates of green crypto try, it remains an ever-stronger anchor in our efforts to address climate change. One need only look out a New York office window this week and see the hazy smoke from the West Coast wildfires to know that this is unsustainable if we are to have a reasonably habitable planet for years to come. Faced with this reality, crushing 1.069 mining rigs under a steamroller is woefully not enough, but it is a start.