Russians Sow Bitcoin With Nuclear

MOSCOW - Russian authorities arrested several engineers employed in secret nuclear weapons facilities because they were involved in mining cryptocurrency including bitcoin. They utilize one of the supercomputers to collect bitcoin and other virtual coins.

The engineers worked at the Russian Research Institute of Experimental Physics, a secret Russian nuclear weapons facility located in Sarov.

The heavily guarded nuclear facility is where the first Soviet Union nuclear bomb was built. According to BBC reports, there are around 20,000 employees and one of the strongest supercomputers in the country there.
The supercomputer can operate on one petaflop or perform quadrillion operations per second. It's ideal for carrying out calculations and nuclear scientific simulations.

According to several Russian media reports, the employees tried to use the power of supercomputers to mine cryptocurrency. However, their actions were detected when trying to connect a machine that is usually offline to the internet.

Mining virtual coins is an activity to collect cryptocoin without paying. But, that method requires computer power and great energy.

Mining activities for bitcoin and digital currencies is now a world trend. Small-scale miners are struggling to compete with large operations involving supercomputers, especially supercomputers from nuclear facilities.

"There have been attempts to use unauthorized office computing capacity for personal purposes, including for what is referred to as mining," a spokesman for the facility told Interfax news agency, quoted on Saturday (02/10/2018).