Don't Bitcoin in Mission, British Columbia!

Good Day Readers:

​You don't have to be growing marijuana to get raided for it. At least one Bitcoin miner was "visited" by police because unusually high power usage led them to suspect he was growing marijuana, according to an unconfirmed report that apeared Monday on the site Techland.

Bitcoin, the anonymous virtual currency, uses distributed computing power to validate transactions. Users who dedicate their CPU cycles to the network are potentially rewarded with Bitcoins - similar to gold mining except instead of digging a miner uses cryptographic math.

Like grow ops, Bitcoin runs up significant electricity bills producing a lot of heat because super-fast computers are used. In the past, high power consumption has alerted police to clandestine marijuana operations and busts have resulted. Mission, British Columbia has a bylaw that allows the town's Public Safety Inspection Team to search peoples' homes if they use more than 93kWh of electricity per day.

Increasingly, ubiquitous prosumer computing could lead to false positives not just for Bitcoin miners but also hardcore gamers, as well as, anyone runnning video rendering farms or web servers at home.

Should be interesting to see how the courts adapt to these uses when interpreting reasonable suspicion standards.

Sincerely,
Clare L. Pieuk