An employee of a Russian payment service provider Qiwi mined 500 thousand bitcoins using the company’s self-serving terminals. It took him only three months back in 2011 to pull it off, local media report. The sum for that year was already shocking – 5 million dollars. Now the 500 thousand of BTC units would be worth billions.
Interestingly, after the worker was spotted, Qiwi’s co-founder Sergei Solonin ordered to precede mining on all company’s terminals. However, implementing the idea saw a failure.
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In an interview with the Russian media outlet RusBase, Qiwi’s co-constitutor Sergei Solonin unveiled that seven years ago he did not even know what bitcoin is. One day the head of the company’s security service told Solonin that their terminals, set in shops, worked intensively at night despite the absence of users. It was a huge concern as in 2011 the company had over 100 thousand terminals spread all over Russia.
After three months of inner probes, Solonin said, they found out that the company’s senior technical director had been mining bitcoins on the terminals. Within the period he managed to mine 500 thousand coins worth $5 million. As of writing, bitcoin’s price is $7,900. Thus, this number of mined coins would be worth $3.95 billion.
When Solonin learned about this, he did not rush to punish his employee. Instead, he offered to start using terminals in Russia for producing the “digital gold.”
“Wow, that’s a thing! We didn’t know how to make a profit out of these ridiculous terminals, but there’s been a gold mine!” told Qiwi’s co-founder to the Russian media.
Later Solonin required the technical director to give bitcoins back as he had used the company’s resources to gain them. In his turn, the employee quit the job, did not fulfill the boss’s requirement. Currently, his state remains unknown.
Meanwhile, the idea to mine coins on terminals was not implemented. By the time the mining “apps” were restored on terminals, the process of mining became more sophisticated and terminals could not deal with it any longer.
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