Crypto farm in Mexican mountains puts spotlight on cartel funding(www.reuters.com)
36 pointsby JumpCrisscross8 hours ago7 comments
  • roenxi6 hours ago
    > Nestled in the lush green mountains of Central Mexico, next to a sparsely traveled gravel road...

    The economics of this are deliciously surreal and in many ways slightly romantic. You have this dingy little shack-like construction out in the "lush green mountains", run by these lunatics of a Mexican persuasion, coordinating billions of dollars of international financial data in a reliable high-trust manner. I encourage everyone to look at the photo in the article and imagine a fat dude in a singlet sleeping on a hammock because that seems to be the vibe of the place.

    This is a real case of the truth being stranger than fiction. If I were reading about this sort of thing in a novel in the pre-crypto era it'd be a big building in a city or something. Maybe some dudes in suits. Sealed roads.

    Turns out it's going to be closer to an unwashed hermit sitting in their mountain cave spending the days meditating, fighting off snakes and tending to the server racks. Voila, high finance.

    • Spooky235 hours ago
      This type of thing always strikes me. I remember as a kid thinking that it was weird in Star Wars that people are living in the desert with draft animals and primitive conditions, while there are literal interstellar spaceships.

      But… at the end of the day tech is just tooling. Your crypto money laundering information could well be in a building that once housed a donkey with some sort of keeper checking the blinking lights.

  • Havocan hour ago
    Surprised they're getting busted. Running covert farms like this seems like an excellent fit for cartels.

    You can do this in a distributed manner. Grid connections are hard to trace if you bribe/threaten the right people.

    Tempted to conclude that what they are busting must be the tip of the iceberg

  • jimz6 hours ago
    Yeah, how much of this came from the US government? Considering how little hardware has been auctioned versus how much has been subject to forfeiture in view of the DEA's long track record of creating the funding loop.

    Context:

    https://archive.org/details/a-20071-1

    Raw data:

    https://www.forfeiture.gov/

    xref

    https://cwsmarketing.com/

    xref

    https://www.appleauctioneeringco.com/usmarshals

    • enoint5 hours ago
      Assuming no power bill, I don’t think 300 RTX would ever break even, if bought retail. Would have been smarter to try drop-shipping those to China. So, why didn’t they? Was there some condition or stipulation from the source?
  • saejox5 hours ago
    Could also have been some H200 selling inference on openrouter with stolen electricity.
    • delfinoman hour ago
      I wager the stolen electricity part. The cartels have historically have even forced employees of utilities to hook them up on cellular towers at gun point.
  • sonorous_sub5 hours ago
    Reuters is paywalled now? Corruption, thy stench wafts ever further!
  • pelagicAustral5 hours ago
    Are they recruiting?
  • yieldcrv4 hours ago
    > Crypto mining — which uses powerful computers to generate virtual assets such as bitcoin — represents a new frontier

    Slow.

    Crypto always has a predictable multi year time frame from dismissal to integration for leadership, or change in leadership

    Its - bitcoin specifically - is strangely built to co-opt human greed, even I look at the white paper and mining implementation

    So all roads lead to its security