Two people held and others questioned over large-scale thefts from data centres
About 600 computer servers used to mine bitcoin were stolen in Iceland in a series of large-scale robberies in December and January, according to police.
The servers were taken from data centres in Reykjanesbær, near Reykjavik airport, and Borgarnes on Iceland’s west coast.
bitcoin is the first, and the biggest, “cryptocurrency” – a decentralised tradeable digital asset. Whether it is a bad investment is the big question. bitcoin can only be used as a medium of exchange and in practice has been far more important for the dark economy than it has for most legitimate uses. The lack of any central authority makes bitcoin remarkably resilient to censorship, corruption – or regulation. That means it has attracted a range of backers, from libertarian monetarists who enjoy the idea of a currency with no inflation and no central bank, to drug dealers who like the fact that it is hard (but not impossible) to trace a bitcoin transaction back to a physical person.
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