Chinese Authorities Seize Nearly 7,000 Crypto Mining Machines

From the latest cryptonews, we can see that the Chinese authorities seize 7,000 cryptocurrency mining machines which were consuming electric power illegally. According to reports from the local news outlet CCTV on December 22, the confiscation came as part of an inspection of more than 70,000 households, around 3,000 merchants and 1,470 communities.

While the Chinese authorities decided to seize the mining machines, the entire inspection also reviewed factories, mines, courtyards and villages in the Kaiping District of Tangshan city. It was carried out by the Tangshan police in collaboration with State Electric Power Department and other authorities which were looking to inspect suspicious electricity use.

During the entire investigation which originally started in April last year, the authorities seized 6,890 ASIC miners and 52 high-power transformers. Reports from the police showed that the crypto miners were stealing electricity from a nearby village. The police also said that the BTC mining machines were operating 24 hours a day and consuming electricity at rates up to 40 times the ones of a regular family.

China is known in our Bitcoin news as a country where BTC miners are responsible for around 66% of the global hash rate. The country has been actively fighting illicit use of energy by crypto miners and in November, the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and its regulators tightened the grip on crypto mining companies, too.

Other jurisdictions like Abkhazia also intensified the work on the identification of crypto mining farms. As the Chinese authorities seize the mining machines, the government is actively looking to regulate the significantly increased loads of electric networks – all aggravated by the emergence of an ever-growing number of illegal crypto mining farms connected to a local power utility.

Aside from China, in November this year authorities from Iran offered a bounty to anyone who exposes the unauthorized mining operations in the country. The people who expose such operations which are illicit and using subsidised electricity will purportedly receive up to 20% of the recovered damages.

As the Chinese authorities seize mining rigs, it is clear that the mining industry is still growing everywhere around the country and the world. China is one of the key pioneers in the mining space and as such is expected to lead the way with better regulations.