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posted by mrpg on Thursday March 15 2018, @08:50AM   Printer-friendly
from the Florida-Citrus-Man dept.

A gentleman in the southeast orange-growing state was caught and accused of mining cryptocurrency at work, according to the Tampa Bay Times:

TAMPA — A Department of Citrus employee was arrested after he used state computers to produce virtual currency for himself, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

Matthew McDermott, 51, of Davenport was the information technology manager for the Florida Department of Citrus, the agency that oversees the state's citrus industry... [H]e used several computers in the Department of Citrus to mine for virtual currency, which include bitcoin and litecoin.

He wasn't just mining--he was allegedly really, really into it, to the tune of tens of thousands of Department of Citrus dollars:

Utility bills for the department jumped by more than 40 percent between October 2017 and January 2017, at a cost of about $825... McDermott also spent more than $22,000 using a state purchasing card between July and December, [buying] 24 graphic processing units, the FDLE said.

"Grand Theft" and "Official Misconduct" were his charges upon arrest. With bail set at just $5,000 (less than 1 BTC), he probably made bail pretty quickly.

It seems that mining cryptocurrency is the new en vogue temptation scandal.

Also at The Week, whose story mentions the previous incident at Russian nuclear facilities.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 15 2018, @11:36AM (7 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday March 15 2018, @11:36AM (#652901)

    What I want to know is: with $22K invested in additional hardware, and a purported $825 increase in electricity bill, what was his actual yield at the time of mining? Did he even get $800 worth of currency during the period in question?

    Any time I have looked into mining, it has been near break-even to cheaper to just buy the coin outright - if you're paying for your own mining gear and power.

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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by KritonK on Thursday March 15 2018, @12:41PM (3 children)

    by KritonK (465) on Thursday March 15 2018, @12:41PM (#652911)

    It seems to me that mining for cryptocurrencies makes sense only if you are doing it on someone else's expense, which makes it equivalent to stealing.

    Back in my day, when CPUs ran at a constant speed, using idle time to run tasks in the background made a lot of sense: instead of wasting electricity, when you weren't using the computer, you could use the CPU to do some interesting task. These days, CPUs enter a reduced power state, when they aren't running anything, so this no longer the case.

    Breaking even sounds about right, however. If you need x amount of resources, to produce x amount of currency, this gives currency its value, as it represents the resources that were used to produce it. If anyone with a computer can produce currency at a cost that is less than its value, then who would want to buy that currency? They'd just print... I mean mine their own. You don't see governments printing money, whenever they run out, do you? Oh, wait...

    • (Score: 1) by cwadge on Thursday March 15 2018, @07:19PM (2 children)

      by cwadge (3324) on Thursday March 15 2018, @07:19PM (#653060) Homepage Journal

      The x86 (going back to the 8086 with various levels of functionality) featured the "HLT" state which, when called at idle, could significantly reduce CPU power consumption. Unfortunately DOS didn't support it until 6.0, but regardless it's been around a pretty long time. Of course modern techniques, including frequency scaling, are much more efficient. But your CPU definitely used less juice at idle from about '93 onward. ;-)

      • (Score: 2) by mechanicjay on Thursday March 15 2018, @08:16PM (1 child)

        ...your x86 CPU definitely used less juice at idle from about '93 onward.

        FTFY

        Alpha, 68k, MIPS, 6502, PowerPC -- These guys were all on the market in the early 90's and always ran at FULL BORE regardless of if there was any work to do. My God, what a glorious time in computing...

        --
        My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
        • (Score: 1) by cwadge on Friday March 16 2018, @01:07AM

          by cwadge (3324) on Friday March 16 2018, @01:07AM (#653238) Homepage Journal

          x86 is a usually safe assumption, but you're absolutely right. Man, technology moved so much faster back then. Every year seemed like a quantum leap in processing power, graphics, sound, peripherals... by comparison it feels like we're stuck in a technological rut today.

  • (Score: 2) by goodie on Thursday March 15 2018, @02:00PM (1 child)

    by goodie (1877) on Thursday March 15 2018, @02:00PM (#652939) Journal

    I'm interested in this too, that was the first question that popped into my mind: so with all those gizmos, how much money did that actually bring in? I know it's not his money that he spent, but it would interesting to know how much that would give you and when you could expect to break even with that amount of investment. The other thing is how does that electricity bill represent in terms of consumption? Is electricity cheap in that state?

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 15 2018, @05:08PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday March 15 2018, @05:08PM (#653004)

      I don't know where in Florida he is, but most of Florida that I've lived in hovers around ~$0.11/kWh - not California peak terrible, but not Iceland cheap, either.

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  • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday March 15 2018, @03:27PM

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 15 2018, @03:27PM (#652963) Journal

    Did he even get $800 worth of currency during the period in question?

    If he was GPU mining Bitcoin, which is only profitable with ASIC miners and not always profitable then, then he's almost guaranteed to have mined pretty much nothing.

    But what was he mining? The article doesn't exactly say.

    It says he used government computers "to mine for virtual currency, which include bitcoin and litecoin."

    Does it say that because the set "virtual currency" contains members "Bitcoin" and "Litecoin", which it does?

    Or because he was actually mining Bitcoin and Litecoin?