The first headline that grabbed me was the story about the Chinese head teacher who was ‘successfully’ applying the school computers to mine Ethereum.
He was only caught out when other teacher’s at the school were alerted to his activities by “a suspicious whirring noise” – well, that and the arrival of an unexpected and unusually large electricity bill!
The second story contains a rather amusing wordplay between old world and new world financial terminology - involving the rapper 50 Cent and Bitcoin.
50 Cent released an album in 2014 and allegedly allowed his fans to buy the album using Bitcoin, at a time when Bitcoin was valued at just over $600. The sales accrued a total of around $400,000.
It was later publicised that this same Bitcoin account, which had remained untouched from the time of the album’s sales, was now worth around $8 million.
Although that latter story seemed a good publicity stunt at the time, 50 Cent considering it added more cred and cool to his image, it has since come back to haunt him.
Curtis Jackson - the real name of 50 Cent, don’t you know – whilst trying to untangle himself from a long ongoing bankruptcy scenario subsequently felt it more prudent to deny accumulation of this considerable Bitcoin fund.
Meanwhile on the other side of the globe the Federal Security Service (FSB), or Russian’s equivalent of the FBI, had to deal with a group of nuclear scientists working at the restricted area of the Federal Nuclear Centre in Sarov.
Despite it being a top secret nuclear warhead facility, these entrepreneurs found the time to exploit the capability of one of Russia’s most powerful supercomputers to allegedly start mining crypto-currencies.
Apparently, in connecting the fire-walled computer to the internet alarm bells quite literally started ringing – odd they didn’t think of that!
This all reads like fiction - but, I assure it’s not; you really couldn’t make these stories up if you tried.