New UN report claiming mining is a “powerful tool” for money laundering makes zero sense and will be used an excuse to push KYC/AML/Sanctions at miner level – Full story at end of this post.

First, it claims that criminals use “illegal” mining operations to launder money, which literally defeats the entire purpose of money laundering.

Money laundering is done best via businesses that generate quick cashflow – at current hashprice, even if you *did* have free electricity and a all-in hosting cost of 0, one ASIC generates a mere return of ~$6000 over the course of 24 months.

This is particularly true in the fucking LIBYAN DESERT where heat and dust contribute significantly to wear and tear, but I’m sure that the geniuses who wrote this report also take their laptops to the beach.

The amount of nonsense the UN has cooked up here is truly astonishing.

It claims illegal mining operations are hard to detect, which is not just untrue for stealing electricity from the grid, but also for the heat signatures such operations omit.

If you do want to make such operations undetectable, facilities need to be impossibly insulated on the one hand – further diminishing returns on investment – but you also need to utilize off-grid energy.

If these operations use off-grid energy, which the UN names as a power source, then they do not, by definition, contribute to “chronic power outages in Lybia [..] depriving essential services and residential areas”, which the UN also claims, because *they are not connected to the grid*.

An exception to this would be if Bitcoin miners utilized stolen fuel, but then the issue is *people stealing fuel*, not people mining Bitcoin. This further erodes the UN’s claims that Lybia is an attractive destination for “illegal miners” due to low electricity cost, because stolen electricity is *not paid for by definition*.

As widely reported, Lybia’s fuel shortage arises from vibrant black markets. This does *not* happen due to a lack of “anti-money laundering authorities”, or because “bitcoin miners are stealing all the energy,” but because political tensions in the country have ground entire industries to a halt.

If you want to stop people from stealing electricity, maybe next time don’t bomb an entire country back to the Stone Age. You’re welcome.