Russian nuclear engineer arrested for using supercomputer for mining? !

On Friday, February 9, several engineers from the Russian Federal Nuclear Center were arrested for attempting to use Russia’s largest supercomputer to mine Bitcoin.

The Federal Nuclear Center, which employs about 20,000 people, is located in Sarov, a once secret, unmapped city where the Soviet Union's first atomic bomb was produced. Today, Sarov remains off-limits to domestic and foreign visitors without proper permits, and its borders are surrounded by a tight barbed wire fence and military patrols.

Tatiana Zalesskaya, head of the institute's press service, revealed that as far as she knows, a criminal case has been opened against the engineer:

"Some people attempted to use supercomputers and other facilities for private purposes, including so-called mining, without permission. This is undoubtedly a criminal act."

The center’s supercomputer, which has a computing power of 1 quadrillion times per second, was not connected to the internet for security reasons. When engineers tried to connect it to the internet to use it for mining, security authorities had the power to stop the practice and arrest the engineers.

Russia is preparing a bill to legalize Bitcoin, but the details of how mining will be regulated are still unclear, and all mining operations may need to be registered with a central authority. In mid-January, media reported that Russian businessman Aleksey Kolesnik bought two power plants to build his own cryptocurrency mining business.

The engineer arrested this week is not the first to consider using Soviet military-related facilities for mining. IceRock Mining Company plans to operate a mining operation in a former Soviet bunker built in a cave in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

The company has two main considerations: one is to take advantage of the naturally low temperature of the underground bunker, and the other is its location near a hydroelectric power plant. They believe this is an ideal environment for low-cost mining.