Miner Gor Gevorkyan filed a lawsuit against Bitmain in the North Carolina court. He accused the company of using the capacity of users to mining cryptocurrency in their favor. The North Carolina court has the right to consider his case, since Bitmain mining company has an office in Santa Clara, California.
“Until the complicated and time-consuming initialization procedures are completed, Bitmain’s ASIC [Application-Specific Integrated Circuit] devices are preconfigured to use its customers’ electricity to generate cryptocurrency for the benefit of Bitmain rather than its customers,” said in a complaint.
Gevorkyan said that after buying a new miner from Bitmain, it needs to be configured, which can take from several hours to several days. The machines start working at low power, and the cryptocurrency mined during this time is not directed to any account by default.
However, according to the miner, Bitmain recently changed the procedure for launching its ASIC devices so that they immediately start up at full power with high power consumption before the client account is associated with the device. At the same time, by default, the mined coins are credited to their own Bitmain account on their Antpool servers, Gevorkyan adds.
Thus, the devices are initially configured to use users' electricity to extract digital currencies in favor of Bitmain, Gevorkian believes. So the company shifts mining costs to users.
Recently the Chinese mining giant itself sued a hacker, who allegedly stole bitcoins from one of the company's accounts on Binance exchange. According to the lawsuit that Bitmain filed with the Federal District Court of the Western District of Washington on November 7, an unknown hacker hacked a Bitmain account on the crypto exchange in April and stole cryptocurrency from there.
However, the attacker did not simply withdraw the Bitmain funds to his own bitcoin wallet. Instead, he used bitcoins to artificially raise the rate of a MANA — ERC20 token, issued by the virtual reality platform Decentraland. The MANA course took off at Binance in less than an hour from 0.12 to 0.34 dollars. At the same time, the global MANA rate jumped to $0.2.
Bitmain representatives said that as a result, the company lost about 617 bitcoins (Bitcoin), which at the time of hacking was $5.5 million. Probably, a lawsuit against an unknown person will allow the mining giant to make a judicial request for information about the Bittrex and Binance accounts, thanks to which it will be possible to establish the identity of the attacker.
Another exchange at the center of the judicial investigation was Coinbase. A new amended group complaint was sent to the court against the crypto platform. In a document filed on November 20 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the plaintiffs explain that, in their opinion, Coinbase made false and misleading statements about bitcoin cash listing.
The exchange allegedly contributed to the fact that the price of the coin rose, and the price of bitcoin fell. In addition, the complaint states that insiders who knew that Coinbase would add BCH to the listing could buy and sell the token before other customers.
At the beginning of this month it became known that the founders of crypto exchange Gemini, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss sued the creator of the notorious BitInstant service Charlie Shrem. According to the twins, they received 5,000 bitcoins from the “first bitcoin felon”. Winklevoss are sure that Shrem spent these funds on expensive real estate, sports cars Maserati and boats.
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