Russia Arrests Scientists For Using Super

Employees of the Federal Nuclear Center - a top-secret nuclear facility in Russia - have been detained after they attempted to use the country's most powerful computer to mine Bitcoin.

Employees of the Federal Nuclear Center of Russia tried to mine bitcoin with the most powerful computer in the country

Reports from Russia say a criminal case has been launched against these employees. The facility's press release said efforts to mine bitcoin were "unauthorized" since employees are unable to use the facility for private purposes "including so-called mining."

Tatyana Zalesskaya , head of the press department of the research institute, commented that such attempts have recently been registered in a number of large companies with immense computing capabilities, which will be severely repressed, this is technically a hopeless and criminal crime."

The All-Russian Research Institute of Experimental Physics (RFNC-VNIIEF) also known as the Sarov Plant houses the most powerful supercomputer in the country, capable of performing a quadrillion operations per second, suitable for nuclear scientific calculations. Sarov, in the Nizhny Novgorod region, where this facility is located, is heavily guarded and was not even marked on maps for decades. The restricted zone was used by the country to produce its first nuclear bomb during the Stalin government.

The bitcoin fever seems to have reached the ears of the employees of this nuclear plant, who were encouraged to mine bitcoin with the super-computer at hand. The nuclear facility's security department was alerted as soon as employees tried to connect the supercomputer to the Internet. They have now been turned over to the Federal Security Service (FSB).

How many people are involved has not been confirmed, but media reports from Russia suggest that at least two engineers have been detained. We wouldn't want to be in his shoes right now.

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