A mining farm operated for several years in a former store building in the Bayandaevsky District of the Irkutsk Region: a local resident installed equipment for cryptocurrency mining there and connected it to the power grid, bypassing the metering devices.
What Law Enforcement Established
According to the Irkutsk Region police, the illegal scheme operated from 2023 to 2025. In the former retail space, the man installed nine ASICs and arranged the connection so that electricity did not pass through the meters.
The damage from such consumption was estimated at more than 1 million rubles. During searches, the equipment was seized.
The court found the resident guilty of causing property damage through deception or abuse of trust. He was fined 150,000 rubles.
Why Such Farms Quickly Attract Attention
Mining requires stable and noticeable energy consumption. Even a small underground installation can put a serious load on the network, especially if specialized equipment is used rather than a regular central processing unit or graphics processing unit.
ASICs are devices based on application-specific integrated circuits. They are used for proof-of-work algorithms, where the equipment solves computational problems and receives rewards in cryptocurrency.
How a Mining Farm Works and What Income Depends On
A mining farm is a set of devices for mining cryptocurrency: ASICs or GPUs, power supplies, cooling, internet, and a room with reliable electricity and ventilation. The equipment connects to the blockchain network, participates in confirming transactions and creating new blocks, and income comes from block rewards and transaction fees.
How much a farm brings in per month depends on the price of cryptocurrency, network difficulty, equipment power, and electricity costs. Payback is calculated the same way: the cost of equipment and launch is divided by net monthly profit, that is, income after expenses for electricity, maintenance, and premises.
Consumption is calculated by device power: kWh per month = farm power in kW × 24 × 30. The more ASICs or graphics cards operate simultaneously, the higher the load on the network, and the more important a separate power line, cooling, and ventilation become.
Farms can be different: ASIC farms use specialized devices for specific algorithms, GPU farms are built on graphics cards, and cloud mining provides access to someone else’s capacity without installing equipment at home.
Startup costs include purchasing ASICs or GPUs, power supplies, cooling, preparing electrical systems, premises, and maintenance. Home mining is technically possible, but it is limited by noise, heat, wiring load, and tariffs. In Russia, claims usually arise not from the mining itself, but from illegal connections, bypassing meters, and damage to power grids.
In 2024, 2025, and 2026, mining profitability depends on coin rates, network difficulty, electricity prices, equipment maintenance, and connection requirements.
Context: Equipment and Algorithms
In the crypto industry, such devices are primarily associated with coin mining, where power and energy efficiency are important.
- Algorithms: SHA-2 in Bitcoin, Scrypt in Litecoin and Dogecoin.
- Equipment manufacturers: Bitmain.
In Russia, illegal connections of mining installations are regularly subject to inspections: the main complaint in such cases is not about the technology itself, but about unmetered electricity consumption and damage to network organizations.
{
“@context”: “https://schema.org”,
“@type”: “Article”,
“about”: [
{
“@type”: “Thing”,
“name”: “Mining”
},
{
“@type”: “Thing”,
“name”: “Cryptocurrency”
},
{
“@type”: “Thing”,
“name”: “Application-Specific Integrated Circuit”
},
{
“@type”: “Thing”,
“name”: “Proof of Work”
},
{
“@type”: “Thing”,
“name”: “Graphics Processing Unit”
},
{
“@type”: “Thing”,
“name”: “Central Processing Unit”
},
{
“@type”: “Place”,
“name”: “Russia”
},
{
“@type”: “Organization”,
“name”: “Bitmain”
},
{
“@type”: “Thing”,
“name”: “Bitcoin”
}
]
}
