Russian nuclear scientists were arrested for mining bitcoin with a supercomputer

Several Russian nuclear scientists were arrested for allegedly using a supercomputer at the Federal Nuclear Centre in Sarov, Russia, to mine Bitcoin. The incident was reported on February 9, 2018. The scientists attempted to connect one of Russia’s most powerful supercomputers to the internet to mine Bitcoins, which triggered the security protocols of the nuclear center.
 

The Federal Nuclear Centre is a highly secure area where Russia’s first nuclear bomb was produced, and it employs up to 20,000 people. Its supercomputer has a capacity of 1 petaflop, equivalent to 1,000 trillion calculations per second, which makes it an ideal target for bitcoin mining due to the immense computational power required for such activities.
 

Upon discovery, the scientists were handed over to the Federal Security Service (FSB), and a criminal case was launched against them.