Authorities believe they have found the culprit that was causing static for T-Mobile US Inc. customers in southern Brooklyn: an energy-sucking, interference-spewing cryptocurrency miner tucked away in a home.<\/p>\n
Agents for the Federal Communications Commission used direction-finding devices to locate the offending equipment in a home in zip code 11229, an area that includes Sheepshead Bay. On Thursday they sent a notice to a resident telling him to shut off his Antminer s5 Bitcoin Miner, or risk fines and seizure of the device.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe device was generating spurious emissions on frequencies assigned to T-Mobile\u2019s broadband network and causing harmful interference,\u201d David Dombrowski of the FCC\u2019s enforcement bureau, said in the notice. \u201cAre you still actively using the device?\u201d<\/p>\n
The increasingly difficult computations needed to create new blockchains — the encrypted digital ledgers that underpin cryptocurrencies — require powerful computers.<\/p>\n
That means bitcoin mining consumes electricity on a large scale, and operators often choose to work near cheap electricity sources — which wouldn\u2019t seem to include a home in Brooklyn.<\/p>\n
For instance, one entrepreneur put computers inside a cargo container in a dilapidated Soviet-era tractor factory in the nation of Georgia. That site made sense for running servers 24 hours a day because it has access to cheap electricity generated by water flowing from the nearby Caucasus Mountains.<\/p>\n
Authorities believe they have found the culprit that was causing static for T-Mobile customers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341034,"featured_media":248316,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44696],"tags":[187,43,2460],"class_list":["post-249107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cryptocurrency","tag-bitcoin","tag-mobile","tag-t-mobile"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249107"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341034"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249107"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249107\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":249109,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249107\/revisions\/249109"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/248316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}