The cheapest electricity to mine Bitcoin is free electricity, but it doesn't mean it's also legal...
Although China has banned almost anything around Bitcoin and the crypto mining industry, if we may call it this way, looks like there are enough Bitcoin fans out there trying to make a living by mining and selling the most famous digital currency. One of them is Xu Xinghua who seemed to have found his cheap, or should I say free, source of electric energy for mining Bitcoin.
According to a news report from cointelegraph the Chinese court from Datong Railway Transport has charged the ingenious man with 3.5 years of jail and a a fine of 100,000 yuan (around $14,500) for stealing electricity from factories at Kouquan Railway to mine Bitcoin.
The sentence that was released on September 13 charged the Chinese to imprisonment and fined him with the exact amount of money that the cost of electricity was to power his 50 miners that he had for work and confiscated his equipment. The guy has been mining Bitcoin using electricity illegally since November 2017 and it has managed to mine just from April 2018 till he got caught the amount of 3.2 Bitcoin.
Before switching to only mine BTC the ingenious miner was working his gear for Ethereum also, but since April he became a Bitcoin fan and that's all he wanted to get. During the process though some five miners "died" so his lot of 50 computers that were confiscated by the authorities is no longer complete.
China is considered such a mining paradise due to its low prices of electricity and that might be one reason why trading cryptos are banned over there and almost anything related to it seems to get banned. If people would have had the freedom to trade cryptos and use them there would have been much more financial and social freedom for Chinese citizens, but it seems that its leaders don't want that. At least that's what I think.
However, what Xu Xinghua did by mining BTC with stolen electricity is not a solution for gaining financial freedom and just a reason more for China to hate Bitcoin and tighten the laws around it even more. Hope they don't as I really would like to see China back in the game again.
Thanks for your attention