Monday, July 19th 2021
Ukrainian Police Close Illegal Mining Farm with 3800 PlayStation 4 Consoles
The Ukrainian Security Service (USS) have recently exposed a large illegal cryptocurrency mining operation in the city of Vinnytsia. The mining farm was illegally connected to the power grid stealing power so efficiency didn't appear to be a major concern. The SSU seized 3800 game consoles, 500 graphics cards, 50 processors, and various documents with information of the operation. This is the first time we have seen the PlayStation 4 being used to mine Cryptocurrency however the idea isn't insane with various older consoles having been programmed to do so. The PlayStation 4 features an AMD GPU with 18 Compute Units and roughly 1.84 TFLOPs of single-precision compute performance while the PlayStation 4 Pro offers 4.2 TFLOPs.
Update Jul 19th: We have learned that these PlayStation 4 consoles were not being used for cryptocurrency mining and instead were part of a FIFA bot farm creating and leveling up accounts that could later be sold.
Sources:
Ukrainian Security Service, Delo
Update Jul 19th: We have learned that these PlayStation 4 consoles were not being used for cryptocurrency mining and instead were part of a FIFA bot farm creating and leveling up accounts that could later be sold.
46 Comments on Ukrainian Police Close Illegal Mining Farm with 3800 PlayStation 4 Consoles
The real thing is that selling PS4s at $200 each (their market value right now) nets them three-quarters of a million dollars (if they were legally purchased). I'd take the money up front rather than risk not getting caught for theft of electricity over a 400-day period just to break-even with that. And at a conservative 100W per PS4, trying to hide the theft of 0.4 Megawatts can't be that easy.
Yeah maybe switch to mining copper lol
Security Services claim that VOE and their director personally were intentionally mining crypto just for the sake of increasing the apparent electricity usage, all as a part of an evil plan to create a power deficit for this region and increase prices down the road. Basically they say that they were using power for the sake of using power. They also claim around 5-7bn UAH in damages(~185-260m USD).
Also, all of that extensive list of 3800 consoles, 500 GPUs and other trinkets includes hardware confiscated from suspect's homes, not just the warehouse.
I know, math is hard, but stay with me for a minute....
3800 PS4s at a maximum 150W only gives us ~5000 MWh over the course of 1 year
500 GPUs along with the rest of hardware can be generously rounded up to 200W per GPU, or another 900 MWh per year.
Let's be even more generous and round it up to 6000 MWh every year, in order to compensate for climate control, massage chairs, coffee makers and other operating necessities.
First I wanted to be very smug and take the highest tariff possible by today's Ukrainian market prices, but SSU f$#%ed up once again and officially listed it as class 2 industrial, which is 1150UAH/MWh for installations over 27.5kW (about half as cheap as residential, and even cheaper than business tariffs).
All together it only adds up to 6,900,000 UAH in damages per year (equiv 255,555USD), so even if they count all 3 years of "anomalous" usage from Friday's scary chart, it's barely over 20 million UAH in total damages, which is at least 250 times less than their claimed damages. Also, one farm like that is barely enough to put a dent into overall energy usage of the region (maybe a small village, but not an entire oblast'), let alone offset tariffs in a long-term. That scary chart may be actually real, but I'm 666% sure that this farm is incapable of causing such a deficit (heck, even 100 farms like that can't).
I don't wanna get political here, nor do I want to start a lengthy rant with lots of explicit words, but my two prevailing theories are:
1) Law enforcement can't count, and simply missed the mark by a factor of 250-300. Could be intentional, if they have no clue where all the powa's'gone and just need a scapegoat...
2) In the midst of 20% increase of electric power in August and all the following controversies, Ukrainian oligarchs are simply trying to create as much noise as possible to justify or prove the existence of "power deficit". "Blame miners" seems to work for everyone. I've been hearing about this shit for a long time, but only starting this summer I started to see more frequent reports of "busting the biggest ever" mining farm in one region or another. Previous ones were only as big as a typical warehouse shelving full of old ASICs, which isn't even bigger than some rigs in residential installations on YT. Barely big enough to cover a wall of a small abandoned utility shed near an old transformer station. I guess they ran out of dummy asics and had to spend a little cash on used PS4s.
As sad as it sounds, in my country both are a real possibility.
a game is made with grinding that we willingly partake in because THAT is the game, we are all collectors.
L4D was a game that had no unlocks, not ranks, no add ons, nothing, just a good game to play, but most games today have some leveling to them and we tend to play the games only for that because as soon as we have everything "There is no reason to play".
And now this, stealing energy to grind up accounts so you can sell them.....honestly imagine being hte developer of a game that this is being done for, the amount of energy completely wasted on nothing, the nothing that you created mind you, its just mindblowing.
“Hey John my wood shop went out of business……that’s too bad Steve. You should make some WoW or FIFA or something characters/cards/items/whatever and level them up and sell them. Good money in that…..”
lol the digital world we live in…….
That's without even mentioning ridiculously huge markets for Guild Wars, WoW, CS:GO and others.