Just now, President Biden took down a Chinese cryptocurrency miner in Wyoming, but there are still many of them.
President Joe Biden’s decree is causing a Chinese-owned Bitcoin miner to be forced off its land in Wyoming. The White House released a statement stating that because of worries about eavesdropping, the government allowed the miner and its partners 120 days to sell the area they operate on. The mine is operated by MineOne Partners, and it is located less than a mile from the intercontinental nuclear missile storage facility at Francis E. Warren Air Force Base.
The White House declared, “There is a risk to national security posed by the presence of specialized and foreign-sourced equipment potentially capable of facilitating surveillance and espionage activities.” Requests for response from China’s U.S. embassy and MineOne Partners were not immediately answered.
According to the statement, MineOne purchased the site in 2022 and thereafter installed bitcoin mining equipment. The transaction was not reported to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States at the time, but a member of the public later made them aware of it. Following an inquiry, CFIUS determined that the purchase had ramifications for national security. The Pentagon is served by a neighboring data center run by Microsoft, which provided the tip. The New York Times reported in October of last year that Microsoft warned that the tip could allow the Chinese to “pursue full-spectrum intelligence collection operations.”
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen stated in a statement that the decision “highlights the critical gatekeeper role that CFIUS serves to ensure that foreign investment does not undermine our national security.”
A vast number of cryptocurrency miner and Bitcoin miners
According to Anita Nikolich, lead investigator of technology innovation at the University of Illinois, land purchases from Chinese corporations in the United States are “absolutely going up,” Fortune said. As regards to Washington Post reporting, 33 states introduced 81 bills this past year in an effort to limit land purchases by foreigners. According to Nikolich, the ruling alleges that the Wyoming operation is a component of a larger scheme rather than a direct assault on Bitcoin miners: The Biden administration “cannot ignore” the “many recent signs of adversarial activity” in vital infrastructure and foreign purchases of lands near such infrastructure.
In fact, intelligence agencies announced in a statement in February that Volt Typhoon, a Chinese hacking network, had been lying dormant inside American train, aircraft, and water systems for five years, “pre-positioning” itself for future damage. Shortly thereafter, FBI director Christopher Wray said before a US committee that Volt Typhoon is “the defining threat of our generation.”
Several Chinese-owned miners, including MineOne, are constructing data centers in the Midwest and Southern states, where there is an abundance of arable land and inexpensive energy. “We’re seeing a huge slew of Bitcoin miners,” Nikolich says of that increase. At least 12 states have Chinese-owned or operated miners, according to The Times, and their combined energy consumption equals that of 1.5 million houses. The Chinese Communist Party’s 2021 ban on Bitcoin mining, which upended China’s position as the industry leader and forced operations abroad, is what’s causing the surge in purchases.