• Pirate
    Bitcoin

    Pirates, witches, lava, and bitcoin: Ocean’s 11 meets Iceland 11

    What makes a $2 million bitcoin mining heist uniquely Icelandic.

    It’s a crime so perfect, one can imagine a blockbuster movie about it.  The camera pans to an otherwise unsexy server farm on the frozen tundra of Iceland’s southwest Reykjanes peninsula, home to about 22,000 people. The area is ridiculously quiet in December—literally not even a mouse would be out of hibernation. Cut to the nearby Blue Lagoon—empty of all tourists after closing. Security cameras are triggered only by the occasional mink, fox, or reindeer crunching around the sparse vegetation. That is until December when 11 people, including one security guard, were arrested in a complex bitcoin-mining rig heist. Police still have not recovered the $2 million in gear including…